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Storehouse Tithing 

OR 

Stewardship Up-To-Date 

BY 

JAMES A. HENSEY 



THE REVELL PRESS 
NEW YORK 








I 


i 

Storehouse Tithing 

OR 


Stewardship Up-to-Date 


ilU 

I79& 


BV 

JAMES A. HENSEY 


Author of “The District Superintendent, Asset or Liability?" “Poverty and Preach¬ 
ing, the Truth About It." “The Itinerancy, Its Power and Peril." “The Lay¬ 
man in the Itinerancy.” “The Church, Culmination and Transition.” 


\ 



THE REVELL PRESS 
NEW YORK 



Copyright, 1922, by 
JAMES A. HENSEY. 


BVnn 

.HA 


Printed in the United States of America. 


©CI.A696773 


May be ordered of The Revell Press, 
158 Fifth Ave., New York City, or of the 
author, 2 Church Street, Oneonta, N. Y. 
Price 60& by mail 70£. 


MAR IG 1923 

'V e I 


DEDICATION 

To the Wesley Chapel Methodist Episcopal 
Church, Cincinnati, Ohio, the Mother of Store¬ 
house Tithing, which, when man's devices failed, 
took God at His word: (t Bring the whole tithe 
into the storehouse ” ; thereby not only perpetuat¬ 
ing her own ministry but promising to lead the 
whole church back to the Divine plan, this book 
is affectionately dedicated. 


5 





INTRODUCTION 


O F the making of books on the theory of 
stewardship there is no end. Of the 
making of any books on the practice of 
stewardship this book is the beginning. It enters 
an unoccupied field. Why this is so the author 
adequately explains. That it is so some have been 
painfully aware. The present storehouse move¬ 
ment has suffered seriously through lack of litera¬ 
ture. Persistent inquiry has been met with the 
statement, “ storehouse literature is yet to be 
created.” 

Strange to say, the oldest thing in the Church 
is the newest. Storehouse tithing is traceable to 
the very beginnings of organized religion in the 
earth and yet it is today the latest novelty. This 
prehistoric practice is generally greeted as though 
it were an audacious innovation, an unwelcome 
upstart among the institutions of the Church. It 
appears to have belonged to the lost arts. 

Its chief hindrance is misunderstanding. After 
hearing the plan explained, a cultured Christian 
leader exclaimed, “ I came to this meeting cold 
and hard. I had no use for the storehouse plan. 
All that I had ever heard deepened my hatred of 
it; but no sooner had I heard it explained, than it 


7 


8 


INTRODUCTION 


was sold to me. The only trouble with this mat¬ 
ter is that it is not understood.” Some of its chief 
apostles were once its bitterest persecutors. Not 
to know it is to hate it. To know it is to love it. 
It destroys its enemies by making them friends. 

The main objections to the plan are aimed at 
its noblest features. What wonder, then, that its 
stoutest opponents often become its most enthusi¬ 
astic advocates. Experience proves supposed 
inconveniences to be conveniences. Reluctant 
surrender becomes joyous devotion. Stubborn 
individualism yields to happy fellowship. Frag¬ 
mentary efforts give way to co-operative enter¬ 
prise. Systematic team-work, in the name of the 
church, takes the place of scattered promiscuous 
charities. The satisfaction of seeing one’s church 
lifted to a new place of influence and power far 
exceeds “ the thrill ” of personal administration. 

The above are but intimations of the experi¬ 
ences that transform enemies into friends of the 
storehouse plan. Tike art-glass windows the ap¬ 
pearance from without may be unattractive but 
from within transcendently beautiful. Actual 
demonstration is the sole need of the movement. 

Macedonian calls from Kentucky, New Jersey, 
New York, Connecticut, Minnesota and Kansas 
within the past week indicate the rising tide of 
interest. A half dozen Episcopal Areas are seek¬ 
ing light concerning the plan. There is every 
indication that the attention of the whole 



INTRODUCTION 


9 


Protestant Church will presently be turned toward 
storehouse tithing. 

It is therefore very timely that this book should 
make its appearance. The author is eminently 
qualified for the task. He was among the first to 
sense the significance of the present storehouse 
movement. As one of the superintendents of the 
Methodist Episcopal Church he has promoted it 
in the various types of churches comprising his 
district. For a series of years he has seen it thor¬ 
oughly tested without being found wanting. As 
editor of The Storehouse Advocate he has con¬ 
vincingly marshalled the facts of experience. His 
frequent articles in The Christian Advocate have 
enlisted more than national attention. He writes 
not merely from natural aptitude but from actual 
experience and observation. Deepening convic¬ 
tion has led him to speak strongly. His con¬ 
clusions have been reached in the laboratory of 
experience. His predictions are logical conclu¬ 
sions from such premises. He will seem radical 
only to those who have not lived in the storehouse 
atmosphere. His claims will appear exaggerated 
only to those not conversant with the facts. That 
the book will draw the fire of adverse criticism is 
neither unexpected nor undesirable—opposition 
being preferable to indifference. Those who 
come to this work to scoff may stay to pray. The 
demands of the book, like the cause it advocates, 
are eminently fair and reasonable. By neither are 




10 


INTRODUCTION 


afflictive requirements imposed on church or in¬ 
dividual. Only blessings are offered to both. If 
the blessings of storehouse tithing are in disguise, 
they are none the less real. Like many another 
good cause, it is the friend of its opposers. The 
eager desire of its converts to share its blessings 
indicates its joyous experiences. 

It is this generous impulse that has constrained 
the author to share the riches of the storehouse 
plan. 

It is a highly esteemed privilege to introduce to 
the reader our mutual friends, the author and 
his book. 

Geo. S. Conneee. 

Waverly, New York. 

March, 1922. 




PREFACE 


T HE author has long regretted that so much 
of the strength of his ministry had to go 
into the disagreeable task of coaxing re¬ 
luctant Christians to support the church they 
loved but did not know how to finance. 

It took him a generation of years to learn that 
the fault was with faulty methods and not with 
an indifferent, obstreperous, or impoverished 
constituency. 

This book does not exploit a new remedy for 
an old evil, but an old solution for a modern 
evil. The Old Testament Church knew nothing 
of the financial embarrassments of the New 
Testament Church, nor was the latter church 
poor until it abandoned the only financial system 
(tithing) that God ever gave His Church in 
either dispensation. 

Two requests are made of the reader: 
Whether assenting or dissenting, pursue the 
argument to its conclusion. 

Let your attitude be determined by the evi¬ 
dence, and that alone. 

The author wishes to record his obligation to 
the associate pastors of the Waverly, N. Y., 
Methodist Episcopal Church, the Revs. George S. 


11 


12 


PREFACE 


and Frederick W. Connell, for suggestions in 
connection with the preparation and reading of 
the manuscript; to the Rev. Ralph S. Cushman, 
D.D., of Rochester, N. Y., to the Rev. Bruce E. 
Pierce, of Geneva, N. Y., to the Rev. Gervaise 
Roughton and William H. Roberts, of Cincinnati, 
Ohio, for valuable information. 




CONTENTS 


PAGK 

I. The Present Crisis. 15 

II. Is There a Standard?. 29 

III. Has the Standard Been Changed? 38 

IV. The Tithe in the Church oe 

To-Day. 48 

V. When and How Shade the Tithe 

Be Paid ?. 54 

VI. The Storehouse Covenant. 73 

VII. Advantages oe the Storehouse 

Plan. 84 

VIII. Storehouse Tithing in Practice. . 98 

IX. Objections Answered. 114 

X. The Danger oe Compromise. 139 

XI. Some Important Questions. 157 


13 












I 

The Present Crisis 

T HE Christian Church is potentially the rich¬ 
est but actually the poorest organization in 
the world. Its material resources are un¬ 
limited, and unavailable. Its task is colossal, its 
reserve power inexhaustible, the truth of which it 
is the custodian indestructible, its financial possi¬ 
bilities adequate—and always beyond its reach. 

The Christian Church is the poorest financed 
institution in the world. Its sense of obligation 
for the moral and spiritual welfare of the race is 
very keen. Its dreams for race service were never 
saner—and always its hands are tied because its 
resources are in purses it does not know how 
to open. 

Its constituency is high in intelligence: rich in 
loyalty, having been pledged by the most sacred 
rights known to the race, but largely reduced to 
treadmill existence because it has neglected the 
scriptural method of approach to its financial 
problems. 

We marvel that the Children of Israel should 
have wandered forty years in the desert with 
Caanan only a few miles distant, but the Christian 
Church has wandered four hundred years in the 


IS 


16 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


wilderness of inadequate, man-made financial 
schemes when the rich meadows, verdant hillsides, 
and flowing streams of God’s Caanan reposed be¬ 
tween the lids of the Book it believed, but did 
not understand. 

Though the residuary legatee of the world’s 
best hope, the church has been reduced to the 
status of a mendicant, begging instead of dispens¬ 
ing alms. 

It was the tragic blunder of Protestantism to' 
abandon, and without the shadow of warrant, the 
Divinely given and never repealed or modified 
method of financing the kingdom of God on earth. 

The results, easily foretold, have been similar 
to those which always follow the abandonment of 
the Divine plan: experimentation, dissatisfaction, 
insufficiency. 

Who, acquainted with the present medley of 
schemes to finance the kingdom of God, will 
assert the sufficiency of any one or all of them? 
Some are puerile, others childish, while most are 
without the shadow of scriptural warrant, involv¬ 
ing Christians in vast labor, pitiful disagreements, 
while always leaving a hiatus between what is 
needed and what can be gotten. 

The ease with which the Christian church has 
reasoned itself out of the sense of real responsi¬ 
bility for its own financial shortcomings, is a 
curious commentary on human nature. God has 
never changed His mind, modified His law, or 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


17 


given authority for hazardous experimentation. 
All that He ever said upon this important subject 
stands unrepealed on the pages of inspiration, yet 
ignored with a frown or rejected by a gesture! 
(And that by a church which bitterly arraigns 
the ancient church for its mental and moral 
obtuseness). 

The church accepts the command, “ go ye into 
all the world and preach the gospel to every 
creature,” and stands ready to obey—to the ex¬ 
tent of its available resources. It passes the hat, 
the collection box, the subscription paper, or its 
solicitors go hurriedly from door to door one 
afternoon every three hundred and sixty-five 
days, accepting always such sums as the people 
may be willing to give. Each individual, of 
course, being judge and jury as to what or 
whether he will give, and that is the end of it, 
except as deficiencies are pieced out by methods 
which never look well in print! 

It is all excessively casual, faint-hearted, un- 
scriptural, and is voluntariness run to seed. 
While a delightful sense of irresponsibility per¬ 
vades the congregation always sensitive about the 
mentioning of “ mere ” money. (It is so delight¬ 
ful to be unvexed by a fixed standard, and allowed 
to do just as one pleases, particularly in such a 
matter). 

But how pathetic it all is. After centuries of 
waiting the doors of the world are open to the 




18 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


preaching of the gospel, while heathen religions 
are being dissolved under the white light break¬ 
ing from the pages of inspiration. Many Mace¬ 
donian calls are heard: “ come over and help 
us.” Every denomination accepts a larger and 
larger program of service to nations in dark¬ 
ness; conducting vast educational campaigns 
among its own followers, culminating in emo¬ 
tional attempts to raise great sums by subscrip¬ 
tion, and then is subjected to the humiliation of 
being able to collect only seventy, sixty, or fifty 
per cent of the money pledged, while finally the 
stream which promised so much dries away to 
driblets. 

The church complains because Christians sub¬ 
scribe reluctantly and pay poorly. But it must be 
said that the constituency of the church is more 
sinned against than sinning. Even Christians do 
not know truth intuitively. When their leaders 
are either blind or silent (mayhap both), lead¬ 
ers and led stumble into the ditch together. 
Christian people are anxious to do the will of 
God, and discharge their full obligation to the 
world, but if they are not taught the will of God 
or how to meet its requirements who will be held 
responsible? 

Until recent years the doctrine of Christian 
Stewardship had fallen into innocuous desuetude 
in the Church. Accepting an incidental reference 
to a benevolent collection for a persecuted church 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


19 


by a visiting apostle, as the New Testament plan 
for financing the kingdom of Jesus Christ, the 
church has been led into perpetual poverty by the 
plan which proposes that every Christian shall 
give exactly what he pleases, so long as he thinks 
he is giving in proportion to his means. 

Yes, we understand fully that that is not the 
end at which the plan so long in vogue aims. But, 
after participating in its operation for a genera¬ 
tion, among hundreds of churches and tens of 
thousands of Christians, we do not hesitate to say 
that this is the only goal it ever has or ever can 
reach: leaving every Christian free to give just 
what he pleases. 

Ever since the Christian Church was shunted 
onto this narrow gauge side track it has always 
been a beggar. So it must remain, unless it will 
abandon its man-made makeshifts and return to 
the one revealed broad gauge main track where 
will be found safety and sufficiency. 

The present plan works as follows: it leaves 
each Christian free to 

Give what he pleases; 

When he pleases; 

Where he pleases; 

As he pleases; 

If he pleases, and (particularly) 

If he is pleased! 

Recall how you have fixed the standard of 
your contributions to religion in the past. There 



20 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


was no one standard applying impartially to all 
by which you determined the amount. You gave 
what you pleased, you paid it when you pleased, 
you put it where you pleased, that is, if you were 
pleased, and if not, you gave little or nothing. 

Your church is enduring the annual agony of 
taking the budget. Circumspect solicitors go 
timidly from door to door. Each one gives what 
seems right in his own eyes. Great caution is 
used. Shy contributors must be delicately ap¬ 
proached. Few suggestions dare be made, and 
no hesitation shown to accept the result, however 
inadequate. Any attempt to argue the question is 
resented as dictation. “ Is not my money my 
own, and can I not give what I please?” “ O, 
certainly,” the abashed “ beggar ” hastens to say, 
and seeks to leave Mr. Owner (?) in the best pos¬ 
sible mood, so that he will not sour on the whole 
institution. 

Why is every treasury in the church, from the 
smallest up to the largest unit, usually faced with 
a deficit instead of a surplus? Because people 
give what they please. 

Why must the church resort to fairs, sup¬ 
pers, questionable theatricals, wasting time and 
strength financing its actual necessities ? Because 
its members have been recruited with the tacit 
understanding that they would be allowed to give 
what they pleased. 

Why is there never enough money for the 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


21 


one spiritual, fundamentally necessary kingdom 
among men, upon whose growth the race is more 
and more dependent ? There is but one answer: 
the church, abandoning the Divine standard for 
supporting the kingdom, instructs each man to fix 
his own! 

In other words, the church is poor only because 
it has the poorest possible financial system. And 
this is poor because it is man-made, not God 
given. 

The constituency of the church is fabulously 
rich, probably the ablest group financially in 
human society. But riches, unless available, are 
useless. Unavailable riches are an exasperation, 
fostering dreams that cannot be realized. That 
has been the bitter experience of the church for 
the past century. It has known itself to be rich 
(that is, it knew that its members were rich; con¬ 
trolling, to a significant extent, the wealth of the 
world) and has been dimly conscious of the 
mighty works it should do, but forever held to 
the struggle for existence by a constituency which 
it has kept from the knowledge of the Divine plan 
for financing a Divine Kingdom. The resources 
of the church have been so meagerly marshalled 
because the church has overlaid the Divine plan 
with human experiments. 

Does any other organization finance itself in 
this slip-shod way? (Slip-shod, we suppose, 
means smooth-shod on a steep or slippery road- 



22 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


bed: an exact description of existing ill-starred 
attempts to finance the church.) When you ask 
for a ticket to New Orleans, San Francisco, Chi¬ 
cago, or New York City do you give the agent a 
“ contribution ” based, not upon what the road 
really needs, nor yet upon the character of the 
service to be rendered, but wholly upon your idea 
of what you can give? You would not think of 
dealing that way with a railroad, would you? 
Not if you wanted to get to one of these cities. 
Every locomotive in the United States would be 
“ dead ” in ten days, and every railroad between 
the Gulf and the great lakes, the Atlantic and the 
Pacific reduced to two streaks of rust in ninety 
days if its patrons were allowed to make “ contri¬ 
butions ” for services rendered. That is the exact 
way we are trying to finance the largest and most 
important institution in human society! 

Would it not tickle your funny bone if the local 
Ladies’ Aid Society of the Pennsylvania Railroad 
announced a Christmas Bazaar to help out the 
annual deficit; or, if the United Order of Knights 
and Ladies of the Golden Rail should hold a 
series of ice cream socials to help pay arrearages 
due the ticket agent and baggage smasher; or if, 
when the Chicago Limited got one third of the 
journey, the president of the company should 
“ pass the hat ” to buy coal to pull the “ contribu¬ 
tors” the rest of the way? (By that time the 
sensation would get farther into your anatomy 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


23 


than the funny-bone.) We readily see the ridicu¬ 
lousness of that method when applied anywhere 
except to the Christian church. Is it because we 
think anything is good enough for the church? 
Or is it because, in a law controlled civilization, 
with exact weights, measures, and standards 
everywhere we like to reserve one place where we 
can do exactly as we please! If so, why pick on 
the church? Why not take something of lesser 
importance like the “ movies,” cigars, candies, or 
chewing gum ? It would be all right to give them 
what we think they are worth or we can afford, 
but when it comes to the Church of the Eternal 
God we think He ought to he allowed to have 
something to say about it! 

Now, if this voluntary principle, which we in¬ 
sist upon applying to the church, is so valuable 
why not pass it around, especially in these profit¬ 
eering post-war days. If, in your judgment, the 
fixed price is more than you can pay, why not lay 
down just what you please, and, gathering up the 
goods, walk out of the store? That is precisely 
the way you have been doing with your church. 
It must take what you are willing to “ give ” 01 
you will gather up your dolls and go home. 
Here is the one place where you will not be argued 
with, “ dictated ” to, or even allow the matter to 
be discussed—except in a tentative and feeble 
way. Maybe it is because you think the church 
does not amount to much, and it is an act of pun 




24 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


(and unnecessary) benevolence on your part to 
help keep it alive! At least, one is tempted to 
think so. 

But why not pass a good thing around? If 
this is the best plan for the church, why not let 
the butcher, the baker, and the candle-stick maker 
know about it ? Surely, the church has no patent 
rights. Even if it has, they should be waived for 
the general good. The church might even collect 
a royalty for its use! 

How long would the most prosperous grocery, 
dry goods, or furniture store last if their patrons, 
instead of paying prices, made “ contributions ” 
for the arm fulls and van loads they carried and 
carted away? 

The Christians of America spend hundreds of 
millions of dollars every year upon various and 
unnecessary forms of amusement. When you 
step up to the enclosure and ask for several of the 
best seats in the house, do you push through a 
“ contribution ” based upon what you think you 
are able to give? Come now, is the theatre a 
more important institution than the Christian 
Church? If it is not why do you allow it to 
mulct you by an arbitrary standard, while you 
compel the church, the finest asset of American 
civilization, to accept a principle that would close 
up every “ movie ” and chewing gum factory in 
thirty days? Is that being square with God, with 
man, with the next generation? 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


25 


The only ones who live upon the voluntary 
principle in society are its beggars and depend¬ 
ents, including the Christian Church. Every in¬ 
dividual receives a wage based upon the service 
rendered, while every organization, commercial, 
or professional enterprise has fixed schedules of 
prices. But when the collection plate was coming 
down the aisle, you reached in your pocket and 
felt free to decide whether it should be a penny, 
a nickel, a dime, or nothing, did you not? And 
when the budget solicitors came the last time 
there was no other standard than your own judg¬ 
ment which determined what you gave. Maybe 
you asked what others were giving; how much 
the richest man in the church had given; whether 
there was a general tendency to increase or de¬ 
crease, and then you gave as your fellow Chris¬ 
tians were giving, with little or no consideration 
as to your real ability, the actual requirements of 
the budget, or the law of God! And yet men 
complain about the begging habits of the church, 
and the constant drumming for dollars! 

If this is a true diagnosis of the method by 
which Christians determine what they will give to 
the church, and who acquainted with all the facts 
can question its accuracy, is it a matter for won¬ 
der that the church is always poor ? 

Again, the modem Christian not only arrogates 
the privilege of giving what he pleases, but pays 
it when he pleases. Every railroad in the world 



26 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


not only has a definite schedule of prices, but the 
terms are always strictly cash. You can no more 
ride and pay what you please, than you can ride 
and pay when you please. 

Every public service corporation serves its 
patrons on the time limit basis. No one is allowed 
to determine what he will pay or when he will 
pay. It is true, you do not have to pay—but the 
gas or electricity or water will be turned off at the 
end of the designated period if you do not, while 
the conductor of the trolley will gently (?) propel 
you to the exit if you insist upon your privilege 
to decide what and when you will pay! 

The duplex envelope system, but recently intro¬ 
duced, has increased the volume and regularity of 
the church’s support, but it can never be an ade¬ 
quate solution, for it still leaves the individual 
free to decide what he will give. 

Every successful business in the world is run 
on a cash down, or cash in thirty or sixty days 
basis. If longer credit is desired, the price is 
automatically extended. Customers next door or 
on the other side of the world ask the terms and 
adjust themselves accordingly. Only when we 
come to the church do the customers decide what 
they will pay and when they will pay! And yet 
we wonder why the church, like Mephibosheth, is 
lame in both feet. It is a wonder that it has any 
feet at all! 

Not only do modem Christians claim the right 



THE PRESENT CRISIS 


27 


to decide what and when they will give, but also 
where they will give. A former parishioner who 
had kept his membership in his boyhood home, 
used to say: “ I cannot give much here because I 
have to give back there. ,, But the folks “ back 
there ” said: “ He has told us for years that he 
could not give much here because * I have to 
support the church over there/ ” Between 
“ back there ” and “ over there ” the church got 
nowhere. 

How often are solicitors of the local church 
told: “ O, this is not all I give for religion and 
benevolence. I believe in distributing it around.” 
“ Scattering ” would be a better word. Why not 
say to your coal dealer: “ It is an outrage for you 
to expect me to pay that big bill. I will have you 
know, sir, that I believe in distributing the money 
I set aside for coal. I have helped to keep many 
poor families supplied with coal this past winter, 
and some of my ‘ coal ’ money has gone there. 
You should not expect to get all of it.” Just let 
us know when you are going to make that propo¬ 
sition to your coal dealer. We would like to be 
in the neighborhood at that time! 

Yet Christians who would not think of allowing 
their debtors to settle on that basis insist on the 
church submitting to its practice. Until recently 
the organized church, with its far-flung battle 
lines, was allowed to be the almoner of a tithe of a 
tithe or one per cent of the total income of its 




28 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


members. As the result of great “ drives ” the 
Protestant churches of America have advanced 
their giving to three or three and one-half per 
cent, but only for the designated period of five 
years. The churches are all atremble as to what 
will happen when that period has come to an end. 
That the present temporary standard of giving is 
considered excessive needs no proof, and is ad¬ 
mitted as a distressing fact. When the Cente¬ 
nary, the New Era, the New World—the five year 
forward movements of the Methodists, the Pres¬ 
byterians, and the Baptists have passed—will 
these denominations return once more to the low 
standards of former years? How can such a 
calamity be avoided as long as the church teaches 
its constituency to give what, when, zvhere , and 
as it pleases? 



II 

Is There a Standard? 

Y ES, emphatically. Is it thinkable that God 
would leave such an important matter as 
the support of His Kingdom, endless in 
duration and universal in extent, hanging in the 
air ? Or do you think that He would speak unad¬ 
visedly, vaguely, or without due deliberation upon 
such a matter? Or that He would give His 
church an ill-conceived, inefficient, easy-going 
financial system that would forever leave it stalled 
on the wrong side of the ledger? If so, you 
believe in a God of limited intelligence. And yet 
the eagerness with which men argue for the abo¬ 
lition of the only plan which God ever gave for 
financing His church, and the skill with which 
they contend for an impossible substitute, is both 
interesting and alarming. 

God is very definite about everything he wants 
man to be and do. No glossary is needed to un¬ 
derstand the ten commandments, the moral con¬ 
duct of man under both dispensations, or the 
fundamental beliefs upon which His kingdom in 
all ages was to be built. Is it possible that God, 
understanding the covetousness of the human 
heart and the difficulties that would be encount- 


29 


30 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


ered in financing His kingdom, would either give 
His church no financial system at all or only an 
inadequate one? 

If the present plan, which permits every Chris¬ 
tian to give what he thinks he is able to give, is 
Divine; 

And if this Divine plan proves inadequate in 
practice; 

It follows, therefore, that we believe in an 
inadequate God, worship an inadequate God, and 
are trying to build the Kingdom of an inade¬ 
quate God! 

Does it not ? 

On the other hand, we find that God has 
spoken promptly, clearly, and finally upon this 
subject. Obscurity here, as is very generally the 
case, has its origin in man’s unwillingness to 
accept the Divine decision; his age-long propen¬ 
sity to say: “ Yea, hath God said?” He has shown 
an endless tendency for modifying the Divine 
decisions; and, by subtle insinuations, lowering 
the Divine standards. He has developed an un¬ 
canny knack in explaining away the plainest 
statements of Jehovah; or, at least, in evading 
their application to his age, and to him. Artful 
dodging, is his long suit! 

Out of remotest antiquity comes the principle 
of the tithe. It antedated the birth of the Mosaic 
code. Before Cain, Abel, Noah, Abram, Isaac, 
Jacob, it was. It was neither originated by nor 



IS THERE A STANDARD? 


31 


passed away with the Mosaic law. But the or¬ 
ganization of the Jewish tribes into a nation, with 
a regulated worship, and an established priest¬ 
hood, led Jehovah to systematize tithe paying, and 
apply it to the whole life of His church. 

Israel was given three distinct tithes. Not 
polite requests or fervid appeals to generosity, but 
three definite tithes, whose payment was not op¬ 
tional with any or obligatory only upon the rich, 
but equally binding upon all, and to be evaded by 
none. 

The first is stated in Leviticus xxvii, 30: “ And 
all the tithe of the land, whether of the seed of 
the land or the fruit of the tree, is the Lord’s, and 
is holy unto the Lord.” This tithe, while belong¬ 
ing to the Lord, was given to the children of 
Levi for services to be rendered: “ Behold, I have 
given all the tithe in Israel to the Levites in return 
for the services which they served.” No source 
of increase, whether of land or flock, was ex¬ 
cluded from the payment of this tithe, while a 
tithe of this tithe was paid by the Levites for the 
support of the High Priest. 

We see that Jehovah, systematic and thorough 
as we might expect Him to be, provided for the 
support of His first official ministry, not upon the 
basis of paying what they please, when they 
please, where they please, but upon the statement 
of a definite, portion, to be paid at a designated 
place. 



32 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The second tithe is mentioned in Deuteronomy 
xiv, 22-27: “ Thou shalt surely tithe all the in¬ 
crease of thy seed which cometh forth from the 
earth year by year, and thou shalt eat before the 
Lord thy God in the place which He shall choose, 
that thou mayest learn to fear the Lord thy God 
always; and if the way be too long for thee so 
that thou art not able to carry it thou shalt turn it 
into money and bind up the money in thy hand, 
and thou shalt go into the place which the Lord 
shall choose and thou shalt bestow the money for 
whatsoever thy soul desireth, and thou shalt eat 
there before the Lord, and thou shalt rejoice there, 
and thy household, and the Levite that is within 
thy gates.” This is known as the Festival Tithe. 
Twice each year the families of Israel went to 
Jerusalem to worship. This tithe provided suf¬ 
ficient for these occasions. 

The first tithe belonged to Jehovah, and the 
individual had nothing to say about its disposi¬ 
tion. The actual expenditure of the second tithe 
was left in his own hands, but it had to be re¬ 
served for these religious pilgrimages. 

The third tithe is stated in Deuteronomy xiv, 
28: “ At the end of every three years thou shalt 
bring forth the tithe of all thine increase in the 
same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: 
and the Levite, because he hath no portion, nor 
inheritance with thee, and the stranger, and the 
fatherless, shall come and eat and be satisfied that 



IS THERE A STANDARD? 


33 


the Eord thy God may bless thee in all the work 
of thy hand which thou doest. ,, This is known 
as the Poor Tithe. 

We find that Jehovah provided three distinct 
tithes for three distinct purposes: 

1. The adequate support of the priesthood. 

2. Financing the national religious pilgrim¬ 
ages. 

3. Proper support for the poor and unfortunate 
of the entire nation. 

The principle of the tithe was brought out of 
the atmosphere of the occasional and voluntary, 
and written into the definite law of a settled na¬ 
tion. When the fullness of time came it was like 
everything that Jehovah did or does, thorough, 
and in principle, settled forever. 

The subsequent history of Israel showed that 
God’s blessings always accompanied the observ¬ 
ance of this law, and that disobedience always 
meant disaster. In the days of Malachi national 
conditions were deplorable in the extreme, and the 
Prophet does not hesitate to charge actual and 
impending calamities upon the fact that Israel 
had become a nation of robbers: “ Will a man rob 
God? Yet ye have robbed Me. But ye say, 
wherein have we robbed Thee? In tithes and 
offerings; ye are cursed with a curse; for ye 
robbed me, even this whole nation. Bring ye the 
whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be 
meat in Mine house, and prove Me now herewith, 




34 STOREHOUSE TITHING 


saith the Lord of Hosts, if I will not open you 
the windows of Heaven and pour you out a bless¬ 
ing that there shall not be room enough to re¬ 
ceive it.” 

Israel was now far removed from the heroic 
days in which the law was given—when obedience 
seemed natural and easy. But neither distance, a 
growing attitude of indifference toward, nor even 
opposition to the law, made the least particle of 
difference: it still was God’s law, binding upon 
the nation, and carried in its hand weal or woe 
to the people. 

It is significant that there is no recorded com¬ 
plaint against the payment of these tithes by the 
people. They never appealed for the elimination 
of some of them or the reduction of all of them. 
This law was never modified, suspended, or 
repealed. 

In addition to these legal tithes, a large place 
was made for free will offerings, and the 
record shows that Israel was generous beyond 
compare. 

One of the most suggestive provisions in con¬ 
nection with the law of the tithe was the place 
provided for the payment of the Lord's tithe. 
Deuteronomy xii, 11, reads: “There shall be a 
place where the Lord your God shall choose to 
cause His name to dwell there; thither shall ye 
bring all that I command you; your burnt offer¬ 
ings, and your sacrifices; your tithes, and the 



IS THERE A STANDARD? 


35 


heave offerings of your hand, and all your choice 
vows which ye vow unto the Lord.” 

The thirty-second verse of this same chapter in 
Deuteronomy reads: “ What thing soever I com¬ 
mand you, observe to do it; thou shalt not add 
thereto, nor diminish from it ” 

These quotations teach clearly: 

1. That there was a definite place for the pay¬ 
ment of the Lord’s tithe—all of it. Keeping it in 
a stocking, a tin box, or in the bank, or in one’s 
own pocket, stable, farm, field, attic, or cellar was 
not to be tolerated. It was the Lord’s, and it was 
to be paid to the Lord. Not a “ limited ” or a 
" modified ” part, but the whole. 

2. The place where it was to be paid was the 
place of worship (church) where God had caused 
“ His name to dwell.” They were not to indi¬ 
vidually administer the Lord’s tithe, “ scattering ” 
it with a free hand wherever fancy dictated. It 
was the Lord’s and the Lord, through His church 
was to administer what belonged to Him. 

3. A solemn warning was added against tam¬ 
pering with the law. Dispositionally, humanity 
is not much improved over those ancient days. 
Man then, like man to-day, instinctively sought 
some way of “ limiting ” or “ modifying ” the 
Divine requirements. No doubt the prophets and 
priests had as much trouble to hold the people 
true to the law as the church of to-day has to 
bring them to a recognition of its existence. 




36 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


In Malachi iii, 6, God says: “ I am the Lord, I 
change not ” What He was He is; what He did 
He does; what He commanded He requires— 
“ yesterday, to-day, and forever/' Unless spe¬ 
cifically repealed or modified, or outgrown by the 
higher civilization which His developing kingdom 
inevitably creates, any law and every law given 
by the Eternal God is necessarily eternal. 

In Matthew v, 17, Jesus said: “ Think not that 
I am come to destroy the law or the Prophets: I 
am not come to destroy, but fulfill." The figura¬ 
tive and symbolical portions of the law, that is, 
the sacrifices which were efficacious only because 
they prefigured The Sacrifice, met their perfect 
fulfillment in the death of Jesus Christ, and 
passed away; while all the rest, including the law 
of the Lord's Tithe, remains! 

The Old Testament church was never put to 
the pitiful expedients that the New Testament 
church must adopt to make ends meet. God never 
rented the choicest pews to the rich, nor suggested 
the circulation of a subscription paper to find out 
what His people would “ give " to support His 
church, nor directed an every-member canvass 
which allowed every one to say how much he 
would “ give " to keep the church alive, nor yet 
suggested that the inevitable deficiencies produced 
by these methods should be met by oyster suppers, 
chicken pie dinners, ice cream socials, baked 
“ stuff" sales, and grab bag gambols! 



IS THERE A STANDARD? 


37 


Can we for one moment imagine that such 
methods would originate with Him ? The idea is 
preposterous. Since God was God He knew just 
what to do. And He did it at the right time, in 
the right way, and with that thoroughness quite 
characteristic of God. Indeed, would it not be 
better to say: “ With that thoroughness neces¬ 
sarily characteristic of God! 

It remained for His church of a latter age— 
that age which was to witness unparalleled oppor¬ 
tunities for the extension of His Kingdom, and 
which was, therefore, to be the neediest of all the 
ages of His church—to argue itself out of the 
Divine way of Kingdom support, while tieing its 
hands with inefficient “ modem ” and “ modified ” 
methods that mean perpetual penury in the midst 
of plenty! 




Ill 

Has the Standard Been Changed? 

P ERHAPS the reader has come this far 
without disagreement. It does not seem 
that the positions assumed can be success¬ 
fully disputed: 

1. That the present methods of financing the 
church are inefficient, leading to endless embar¬ 
rassment, and seriously curtailing the activities 
of organized Christianity throughout the world. 

2. That God did solve this question once by 
accepting the principle of the tithe, and making 
it the fundamental principle by which His King¬ 
dom was to be supported. 

3. The principle and practice of tithing, once 
established, was never modified or repealed. 

But all of that is in the Old Testament, some 
one hastens to say, while we are living in the 
light and “ liberty ” of the New Testament. Is 
that so? We have been under the impression 
that we were living under both Testaments. And 
that the First Testament, except those portions, 
types, and ceremonies that were fulfilled (filled 
full) by the life and death of Jesus Christ, or 
definitely repealed by Jesus Christ or His Apos¬ 
tles, is just as much inspired to us, and binding 


38 


HAS THE STANDARD CHANGED? 39 


upon us, as it was upon the conscience and prac¬ 
tice of the Jews of three thousand years ago. We 
have not thought of the Bible as two Bibles, but 
one Bible; nor yet made up mostly of antiquated 
or repealed bits of once sacred literature, mean¬ 
ingless now to hundreds of millions of humans 
whose bosoms throb with the passions and prob¬ 
lems of time and eternity. We have thought that 
in the Bible God had spoken once, and that that 
“once” was for “yesterday, to-day, and forever.” 

The closing of the Old Testament Canon meant 
that everything was intact, except the figures, 
symbols, and ceremonies that went with the an¬ 
ticipatory worship of the Jewish Temple. The 
blood shed by countless animals could wash away 
no sin except as it anticipated the supreme tragedy 
of the ages—the dying of the Only Begotten on 
Calvary's tree. 

The New Testament does not contain one word, 
sentence, or paragraph, either from the lips of 
Jesus Christ, or the pen of any one of His biog¬ 
raphers, or apostles that suggests, by the remotest 
implication, the repeal of the principle of the tithe. 

If one syllable had ever dropped from the lips 
of Jesus against the principle or practice of tith¬ 
ing, would it not have been reflected in His re¬ 
corded utterances? The tithe had been so long a 
part of the law, and had been so long practiced 
by the people, that Jesus and His disciples evi¬ 
dently took it for granted. 



40 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


There is every reason for believing from His 
parentage, education, the community in which He 
was reared, the religious practices to which He 
had been accustomed from childhood, His own 
statements about His attitude toward the law, and 
the attitude of the Pharisees toward Him, that 
Jesus had been a strict observer of the laws of the 
nation to which He belonged. The Pharisees 
would have denounced Him instantly if He had 
neglected or refused to pay tithes. That they, 
who were the strictest tithe-payers in the world, 
and were, at the same time, His bitterest and 
most vigilant enemies, never did so, is proof that 
Jesus Christ met this requirement of the law. 

But Jesus did make one clear reference to tith¬ 
ing, and then He unhesitatingly commended it. 
When He poured out His vials of wrath on the 
Pharisees He answered their excuse that they 
were tithers by saying: “ These ought ye to have 
done.” That is, tithe paying was an obligation 
resting equally upon all, and especially meritori¬ 
ous in none. To make it the excuse for injustice 
or moral uncleanness was reprehensible. Jesus 
laid on the lash with a heavy hand, but He was 
fair enough to commend the only thing in their 
lives really worth while—their tithe paying. 

On this occasion, you will notice, our Lord was 
face to face with the question of the tithe. Now 
was the time to either commend or condemn it. 
If He did not expect this principle to survive in 




HAS THE STANDARD CHANGED ? 41 


the Kingdom in process of establishment, this was 
the time for Him to say so; if He had any other 
method in mind for financing the church of the 
new dispensation this was the time to state it; or, 
if He had not believed in the principle of the tithe, 
and had not Himself practiced it, this was the 
time that He ought to have said it! How was 
the crisis met? By the calm statement, in effect, 
that tithing was such an ordinary duty; and so 
generally practiced, that it deserved no praise! 

Do you think that Jesus Christ was ignorant 
of the importance that future generations would 
attach to every word that fell from His lips. If 
not, did He speak unguardedly when He com¬ 
mended the tithe paying of the Pharisees? 

It is true that Jesus did not formally re-enact 
the law of the tithe. But why should He? Tith¬ 
ing was not dead. He had grown up in the 
atmosphere of its practice. His parents were tithe 
payers, His sisters and brothers must have been, 
and how can we avoid the conclusion that He, 
also, must have met every requirement of the law 
in this, as well as in all other particulars. Why 
should He re-enact a law already in being, and 
everywhere practiced? He did not renew the 
Sabbath law. But why should He? His people 
had been practicing it for centuries. It would 
have been like telling them to drink water when 
thirsty, or to go to sleep when sleepy, or to eat 
when hungry! The Sabbath, the tithe, and the 



42 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


rest of the commandments had been with them 
from the beginning. They were the common¬ 
place facts of their religious life. Of course they 
expect to observe them. Evidently it had never 
entered the mind of Jesus that it was necessary 
for Him to commend the moral law. If it had 
not been for the question of the breathless young 
ruler who ran after Him, crying: “ Good Master, 
what good thing shall I do to inherit eternal life 
it is not probable that He would have said one 
word in commendation of that law. Would that 
have left us in perpetual controversy as to 
whether that law was obligatory under the new 
dispensation ? 

It is well to remember that there was no Chris¬ 
tian church to finance during the lifetime of our 
Lord. The only organized church was the one 
into which He had been bom, with which He had 
always affiliated, and from which He never with¬ 
drew. From the time of its origin this church 
had been supported by tithes and free will offer¬ 
ings. These had been adequate for every neces¬ 
sity. The system was written into the God given 
law of the nation, and incorporated into the fibre 
of the people by centuries of practice. It was 
never in dispute during the lifetime of our Lord. 
None argued against it, why therefore, should 
Jesus discuss it or defend it? But just as soon 
as the Pharisees sought to justify their less praise¬ 
worthy characteristics by hiding behind their tithe 



HAS THE STANDARD CHANGED? 43 


paying, Jesus immediately said, in effect: “ O, no, 
that cannot be allowed a single moment. No in¬ 
dulgence can be bought by the payment of tithes. 
For that is simply doing what we all ought to do.” 
If this question touched us anywhere except in 
our pockets, would we not consider that our 
Lord’s answer upon this historic occasion bound 
the law of the tithe upon all our consciencesf 

The law of the tithe repealed? 

When? 

Where? 

By whom? 

No devious circumlocution, please. No ambu¬ 
latory gesticulations that will camouflage a direct 
answer. Everyone acquainted with the New 
Testament and with the history of the early 
church, knows: 

1. That the only time Jesus Christ mentioned 
tithing He commended it. 

2. That neither Jesus Christ, nor any of the 
disciples who were intimately associated with 
Him for three years, nor Paul, by implication or 
direct statement, ever repealed the law of the 
tithe or discouraged its practice. 

3. That the earliest church was composed of 
disconnected groups of believers, former Jews 
and Gentiles, with limited means of inter¬ 
communication, with no regular ministry, and 
without a definitely organized movement to sup¬ 
port. The few Apostles who travelled among 



44 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


the feeble congregations were supported by free 
will offerings. 

4. That as soon as system and organization 
began to appear in the early church, the principle 
of the tithe was taught and its practice inaugu¬ 
rated. The first Bishop of Lyons, who lived 
within a hundred years of the Apostles taught 
that we ought not to set aside less than a tenth 
for God. Does not this indicate that the practice 
must have been introduced into the church at an 
earlier day? 

5. That just as the missionaries of to-day are 
introducing tithing into the non-Christian world, 
so the earliest missionaries introduced tithing into 
England. In the eighth century, at a national 
assembly summoned by King Ethelwulf, the tithe 
was formally extended to the whole of England. 
This “ continued for seven hundred years, so that 
by the sixteenth century England, like all other 
parts of Christendom, had become a nation of 
tithe payers, every one being taught that God had 
the first claim of at least a tenth upon every 
Christian’s income.” 

Some venturesome ecclesiastical mariner has 
discovered the New Testament standard of King¬ 
dom support in First Corinthians xvi, 2: “ Upon 
the first day of the week let every one of you lay 
by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that 
there be no gatherings when I come.” 

This text, cut off from its context and se - 



HAS THE STANDARD CHANGED ? 45 


quence, has been made to do serious disservice to 
the church of Jesus Christ! 

Does it not show a curious state of mind when 
one text, wrenched out of its logical connections, 
is made responsible for the repeal of the ages-old 
and Divinely adopted method of Kingdom sup¬ 
port, and its substitution by an inferior and 
unauthorized one? 

Here, also, we see the danger lurking in the 
practice, now generally abandoned, of making 
isolated texts teach important doctrines. By sepa¬ 
rating this passage from its Apostolic introduc¬ 
tion and conclusion, it is made to teach something 
entirely foreign to the mind that wrote it. (We 
presume that no one would be more surprised than 
the Apostle Paul, were he alive to-day, to see the 
lengths to which his reference to a benevolent 
collection had been stretched.) 

First Corinthians xvi, 2 should not be detached 
from the preceding verse, which reads: “Now 
concerning the collection for the saints, as I have 
given order to the churches of Galatia, even so do 
ye.” It is not a new financial system that the 
Apostle is introducing, but a few wise sugges¬ 
tions concerning a benevolent collection for the 
persecuted saints at Jerusalem. It is a wise 
principle of interpretation that it is dangerous to 
evolve that which is not involved. The evolution 
of a law repealing the tithe, and the introduction 
of a new and inadequate system for the support 



46 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


of the church out of this direction for a benevo¬ 
lent collection is totally unwarranted. That was 
not the thought in the Apostolic mind, and no one 
has the authority to read that meaning into his 
words. (Theological vagaries are generally based 
upon the same dangerous method of reading a 
foreign meaning into isolated passages.) 

In the third verse of this same chapter Paul 
says: “ And when I come, whomsoever ye shall 
approve by your letters, them will I send to bring 
your liberality unto Jerusalem. ,, Official couriers 
were to carry this benevolent collection, accumu¬ 
lated during the intervening weeks, to Jerusalem. 
There it all ended, so far as we know. It was a 
temporary expedient— to he practiced until Paul 
came —for a temporary need. When the desig¬ 
nated brethren departed for Jerusalem with the 
money which had been collected, that was an end 
to this “system” —so far as we have any evi¬ 
dence to the contrary. 

Space alone prevents the recapitulation of the 
evidence showing that the Church Fathers, when 
faced with the task of providing means for the 
support of a growing kingdom, insisted upon the 
scripturalness of the tithe and that it was the 
uniform method by which the church was sup¬ 
ported until the sixteenth century. God's method 
was then overthrown by the covetous and adult¬ 
erous Henry VIII, of England, who married six 
wives, two of whom he murdered, two he di- 



HAS THE STANDARD CHANGED? 47 


vorced, one died a natural death, while the sixth 
survived him. 

Even Henry VIII did not abolish tithing, but 
alienated the tithes of the church to his courtiers 
and to replenish his private purse. The people of 
England are generally paying these tithes to-day, 
but not to the church.* 

* See The Sacred Tenth, by the Rev. Henry Lansdell, 
D.D., published in England in 1906. Especially a booklet 
by the same author, Back to the Tithe: A Pan-Anglican 
Echo, privately printed in 1908, for illustrations of this 
statement. 





IV 

The Tithe in the Church of To-Day 

T HE passing centuries bring their inevitable 
changes in the thoughts, speech, beliefs, and 
habits of the race. It is a far cry from 
ancient Judaism, with its annual dual religious 
pilgrimages, to the hundreds of millions of believ¬ 
ers scattered throughout the habitable globe. We 
are no longer commanded to appear, with our 
families, twice each year in Jerusalem for worship 
and fellowship. Events have superceded the ne¬ 
cessity for the Festival Tithe, while the develop¬ 
ment of the eleemosynary institutions of society 
have logically superceded the Poor Tithe levied 
every three years. But the first tithe, known as 
the Lord’s Tithe, has never been repealed, modi¬ 
fied or outgrown because no longer necessary, or 
replaced by a newer and more efficient method of 
accomplishing the same end. 

Rev. Richard Duke, in The Christian Guardian, 
Toronto, Canada, January 13th, 1904, puts this 
succinctly, as follows: 

1. It is a principle in jurisprudence that when 
the reasons which originated a law continue to 
operate, and there is no explicit repeal of the 
law, the law remains in force. And this prin- 


48 


TITHE IN CHURCH OF TO-DAY 49 


ciple appears to have the lucidity and force of an 
axiom. 

2. That which passed away was the symbolical 
and figurative. Tithing was neither one nor the 
other, but a duty issuing from the moral law, 
which is of perpetual force. 

3. True, there is no formal re-enactment of the 
tithe. But why should such a formal re-enact¬ 
ment be looked for? The law had not become 
obsolete; it was not indifferently observed. On 
the contrary, it was conspicuously honored in its 
observance. Similarly, there is no formal re¬ 
enactment of the Sabbath law; but Christians 
recognize the law respecting the seventh of time, 
and by a parity of reasoning should recognize the 
law respecting the tenth of substance.* 

The tithe was established by Jehovah for the 
support of His ancient ministry, confined to a 
single small nation, occupying a limited area of 
the earth’s surface. To-day His ministers are 
found wherever man lives, and are, by His direct 
command, carrying His gospel to every tribe, 
race, and nation. The demand for adequate re¬ 
sources are greater to-day than ever before. 
Where there were thousands of Levites there are 
tens of thousands of heralds of the truth; where 
there was one Temple to support there are 
hundreds of thousands of Christian Churches; 

* Quoted from The Sacred Tenth—Lansdell. Vol. 1, 
page 172. 




50 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


instead of a small nation with few very rich and 
few very poor, there are now needy millions 
around the globe; where there were no missions 
to the heathen, the planet is now dotted with 
them; where there was one small agricultural na¬ 
tion to hold true to the faith, there is now a vast 
world community with centralized industrial 
populations to be educated, evangelized, and held 
to the higher paths of Christian Civilization. 

Is it not plain, therefore, O church of the Liv¬ 
ing God, that the reasons which originated the 
law of the tithe not only persist hut are 
multiplied! 

Judaism's needs were limited to a single nation, 
occupying a small area, while the needs of Chris¬ 
tianity are coeval with time and coextensive with 
the race. 

Where Judaism needed millions Christianity 
must have billions! 

Is it thinkable that Jehovah, Infinite in Wis¬ 
dom, would give His first and smaller kingdom, 
an efficient financial system, and then, just when 
it began to assume ages-long and world-wide pro¬ 
portions with greatly increased demands of every 
kind, to supplant it with an illogical and impos¬ 
sible makeshift? 

Would that be the part of wisdom, of even 
human wisdom? 

And shall it be said that God's far-away people, 
living in the early morning of civilization, de- 



TITHE IN CHURCH OF TO-DAY 51 


pendent on “ reeking shambles and smoking 
altars ” for salvation, were superior in devotion 
to those who live in the mid-day glory of the 
latter day church? 

Shall the Jew he enshrined in history as a 
willing tithe payer, while the modern Christian, 
with the blessings of his incomparable civiliza¬ 
tion, stands pilloried before the world as willing 
to pay one tenth or possibly two tenths as much * 

Christians are not only able to pay more than 
the ancient Jews, but will pay more when the 
present faulty mode has been supplanted by God’s 
faultless method. 

Bring the judgment and conscience of the 
church back to God's standard—once raised and 
never lowered—and the followers of Jesus Christ 
will keep every treasury full. 

Does not our investigation justify the follow¬ 
ing conclusions: 

1. That the minimum requirement for the mod¬ 
ern Christian, as for the pre-Christian believer, is 
the tithe, or ten per cent of the net income. 

2. That this tithe belongs to the Lord. It is 
not within the province of the individual to either 
retain or dispense, at his leisure or pleasure, the 
Lord’s tithe. The Word reads: “ The tithe is the 
Lord’s: it is holy unto the Lord.” It is not to be 


* Christians in America are now estimated to be paying 
one-third or one-fourth of a tithe, but there is uneasiness 
as to how long this will continue. 





52 STOREHOUSE TITHING 


hoarded in a bank, invested with other funds to 
be repaid later, nor to be kept while waiting for 
some “ safe and sane ” place to invest it for the 
Master. It cannot be emphasized too strongly 
that man is neither the owner nor yet the steward 
of the first tenth. That belongs to Jehovah. You 
are not the owner of the separated portion of 
your income which the state exacts, whether it is 
levied as city, county, state, or national income 
tax; it belongs to the levying body, and you are 
not recognized as its steward to invest it other¬ 
wise, and finally pay it when, where, and as you 
please. 

3. The Lord’s tithe, like the state’s tax, is to be 
paid at the time and place designated, and to the 
legal representative of the levying authority. The 
law specified: “ There shall be a place where the 
Lord your God shall choose to cause His name to 
dwell there; thither shall ye bring all that I com¬ 
mand you; your burnt offerings, and your sacri¬ 
fices ; your tithes, and the heave offerings of your 
hands, and all your choice vows which ye vow 
unto the Lord.” The tithe was to be paid, not 
retained for future, and precarious, self-adminis¬ 
tration. If it belongs to the individual, it is his 
to give or withhold as he pleases; if it belongs to 
the Lord it is not his, and is not to be retained 
longer than the first opportunity to pay it at the 
designated place. 

4. That Christian Stewardship, so far as 



TITHE IN CHURCH OF TO-DAY 53 


money is concerned, begins where the first tenth 
ends. Until the Christian church accepts the full 
significance of this single sentence it may multiply 
sentences, paragraphs, books, and libraries about 
stewardship and tithing but it will largely be 
meaningless jargon. If, after we have covered 
the whole subject, we conclude that the tithe is 
optional and not obligatory; that God asks it but 
does not require it; and that if we are favorably 
disposed toward the principle, it is still ours to 
say when and where and how the tithe shall be 
used, the effort to reintroduce tithing into the 
church will largely evaporate into thin air. Un¬ 
less we reach the conclusion that the first tenth is 
the Lord’s, and as such is “ holy,” which means 
“ sacred ” “ unto the Lord,” and is never to be 
reserved, or invested by us; but is only to be 
earned, separated, and paid by us, we shall never 
know the joy nor the church the power that re¬ 
sides in the full practice of this Divine principle. 

5. The tenth paid, may a Christian do as he 
pleases with the nine-tenths? Indeed not. All 
that he has came from God, belongs to God, and 
must return to God. He must be the faithful 
steward of every particle remaining in his 
temporary possession. How he uses, neglects, or 
abuses the nine-tenths will show whether he is a 
diligent, negligent, or wasteful steward. 




V 

When and How Shall the Tithe Be Paid? 


T HE author regrets that it seems necessary 
to weave much of his own experience into 
this chapter. He has made several attempts 
to eliminate the personal element, but is more and 
more impressed that he should let the narrative 
proceed in its natural order. 

More than two> decades ago he had the good 
fortune to read Systematic Beneficence, compris¬ 
ing three prize essays, published by Carleton & 
Phillips, New York. The essayists were Abel 
Stevens, Lorenzo White, and Benjamin St. James 
Fry. The time was near for taking the annual 
budget in the church of which he was the pastor. 
The finances had been dragging for years, while 
rich men in the congregation were giving a mere 
moity. The pastor determined to put First 
Corinthians xvi, 2, to the test. If this was the 
real standard of New Testament beneficence, as 
the essayists taught, he proposed to bring it home 
to the judgment and conscience of his parishion¬ 
ers with all the force of which he was capable. A 
series of sermons based upon that passage, (omit¬ 
ting, of course, all reference to the first clause of 
the first verse, and to the conclusion of the Apos- 


54 


WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 55 


tolic command in the third verse!) based largely 
upon the excellent exposition of Dr. Stevens, was 
preached. After explaining the unsatisfactory 
standards by which men usually measured their 
giving to the church: impulse, habit, what others 
gave, the minimum to start with, reserving some¬ 
thing for the extra collection at the end of the 
year, he urged them to readjust their giving on the 
basis of their present prosperity, repeating over 
and over the Pauline injunction “ let every one of 
you lay by him in store as God hath prospered 
him ” There were men in that congregation who 
had been greatly prospered. One man who had 
been advanced from bankruptcy to great abund¬ 
ance, and who was giving the same amount that 
he gave the first year after having been discharged 
from insolvency, some thirty-five years before! 
There were other cases equally inconsistent. 

The pastor felt that this situation could be 
remedied by calling attention to what he had been 
told was the real standard of New Testament 
giving. He knew that these men and women 
loved their Lord and were devoted to the interests 
of His church. Yet here they were giving just as 
they gave when some of them were not worth as 
many hundreds as they were now worth thous¬ 
ands. The final sermon of the series, in which 
there were sundry appeals to readjust their giving 
on the basis of their present prosperity, was 
adroitly timed (so it was thought) to fit into the 




56 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


immediate canvass for the budget The result 
was awaited with great interest. The disappoint¬ 
ment was immediate, terrific! The readjusted 
giving on the basis of their present prosperity was 
entirely in the imagination of the pastor. The 
old sums reappeared, a few slightly increased, 
balanced by an equal number of decreases. 

Wondering whether he had failed to make him¬ 
self understood, the pastor ventured to present 
the matter in private, and with due caution, to a 
few of the better-to-do-members of the church. 
Alack-a-day, he was quickly told by every man, 
with bristling mien, that he was giving ac¬ 
cording to his prosperity. Several hinted that 
that was their own private matter, which they 
discussed with no one, and about which they were 
not in the habit of receiving suggestions, not even 
from their pastor. One man was spending more 
for rubber shoes for his horses than he was for 
the church, while another was putting ten times 
as much annually into his pleasure yacht as he 
was into' the Kingdom of God, but, since it was 
their private matter, nothing could be done about 
it! Another said—but what is the use going 
farther into that which had better be forgotten? 
Suffice it to say that one preacher decided that he 
he might as well hope to lift himself over the 
Alps tugging at his own bootstraps as to raise the 
standard of giving in the church by letting every¬ 
body fix his own. 




WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 57 


But this is not the end of the story. One of 
the most devoted members of this church came to 
him shortly after his last sermon on the New 
Testament Standard of Giving, and said: “ I have 
been much interested in your recent series of 
sermons, but I really do not think you have been 
on the right track. I have a book at home that 
I would like you to read.” The name of the 
book has slipped from the pages of memory, but 
it had been written in competition with the three 
essays comprising Systematic Beneficence, and 
had probably been rejected because it advocated 
the principle of the tithe. It had been privately 
published. 

This was the first time the author had ever 
read one word favorable to tithing in the modern 
church, and he was profoundly impressed. The 
party loaning this book claimed to be a tither— 
the first one he had ever encountered. He at 
once inquired about the giving of this tither. No, 
the treasurer said, it had not been exceptional; 
yes, it was just about what others in similar cir¬ 
cumstances gave. In a few months the salary of 
the tither was increased, while the giving re¬ 
mained the same. Several special appeals were 
turned away with the quiet statement: “ My tithe 
is just exhausted.” The impression made upon 
the pastor’s mind was exceedingly disagreeable. 
If that was what tithing meant, he saw no in¬ 
centive to introduce it into the church. 




58 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


A few years later, in another church, he found 
a gentleman who had been a positive advocate of 
tithing for many years. At first he heard him 
with patience, even delight. He was known to 
have accumulated a fortune in his business, but 
for many years his giving had been on a dead 
level: one hundred dollars per year for the 
budget, and the same for the benevolences. One 
day he showed a bank book to a friend, proving 
that he had ten thousand dollars of the Lord’s 
money deposited in a bank, and in his own name. 
What became of that money ? The author knows 
that a large portion of it finally got into the 
hands of one of the most astute religious fakirs 
of the last century, while the church of which he 
had long been a member to-day has an unpaid 
subscription of $250.00 charged to his account! 

By this time the author had accepted the 
principle of the tithe as the Divine method for 
kingdom support, but never attempted to intro¬ 
duce it because he saw no way to make it 
operative in the modem church. It was, in his 
judgment, a simple matter for the primitive, 
agricultural Jew, to pay his tithes. His income 
was wholly derived from one or two sources. 
When the fruit was gathered, the grain harvested, 
or the seasonal increase of the cattle accomplished, 
the Lord’s portion could be quickly separated and 
paid. Then, too, paying was such a public mat¬ 
ter, bleating and lowing cattle, bulky grains and 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 59 


fruits, and at definite seasons in the year—when 
all Judaism was paying—making withholding in 
whole or in part almost impossible. Everybody 
knew about what his neighbor ought to pay, and 
dishonesty was difficult under those circumstances. 

But how could the system be made to work in 
the complicated modern industrial world? Few 
people knew what the incomes of their nearest 
neighbors were. Money had superceded com¬ 
modity, and there could be no publicity attached 
to the payment of the tithe. The income of 
nearly every Jew—grains, fruits, and cattle'— 
matured about the same time, making defalcation 
difficult; while Christians had incomes of all 
kinds, maturing at all times of the year, and in 
constantly varying amounts; moreover, modem 
Christians were living in a big world, instead of 
one small nation segregated in a territory the size 
of the American State of Vermont, with voices 
calling and hands reaching out for help from 
everywhere; and then, too, people were differ¬ 
ent (?) from former times, and not as willing to 
give money for religion; and finally, here were 
the only two tithers he had ever known, who 
talked much about tithing, but where was their 
tithef 

Just then, along came Storehouse Tithing— 
but that is another story. 

The author wishes to say, as sincerely and 
emphatically as he knows how, that he brings 




60 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


no accusation against the thousands of non¬ 
storehouse tithers in all parts of the Christian 
world. He does not mean to infer that all or 
many or any are like the two described. It must 
have been his misfortune to have come into con¬ 
tact with that kind. Not only does he believe 
that tithing on the individual basis is possible, but 
is persuaded that it is being successfully done in 
many instances. 

In justice to his own convictions, however, he 
must say that tithing on the individual plan 
looks like crossing Niagara on a rope. It can 
be done. Blondin did it. But if everybody had 
to get on this side that way, most of us would 
prefer to stay on the other side! Clear visioned, 
stout hearted, heroic souls, who will go right if 
all the world keeps on going wrong, can tithe on 
the individual plan, and tithe successfully, even 
though they tithe alone. But we are well per¬ 
suaded that if the principle of the tithe is to be 
generally accepted, and if the practice of the 
tithe is to be widely adopted, some method of or¬ 
ganizing the tithers, and of systematizing the 
payment of the tithe must he found. Otherwise, 
campaigns of tithing propaganda will be like the 
gentle rains that follow the spring zephyrs, re¬ 
freshing and fructifying, but soon succeeded by 
the parched heat of summer, in which the church 
will find itself just about where it was. 

The author was the Superintendent of the 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 61 


Binghamton, N. Y., District, of the Wyoming 
Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, from September, 1911, to April, 1918. 
He had many conversations with his friend, the 
Rev. George S. Connell, of Waverly, N. Y., about 
tithing. Mr. Connell had been a faithful teacher 
of tithing in his various pastorates, and had been 
able to lead a number into the practice of tithing 
on the individual basis. News of what had hap¬ 
pened at Geneva, N. Y., where the Rev. Ralph S. 
Cushman, D.D., had introduced the storehouse 
plan, filtered through. These conversations now 
dipped toward the storehouse plan, and soon the 
Waverly pastor decided to make the experiment. 
The response was larger than had been antici¬ 
pated, and the Waverly Storehouse Tithers’ As¬ 
sociation began to function on April 1, 1917, with 
140 members. The income of the association 
exceeded expectations. The number of members 
grew to 165, and stopped. The pastor came to 
the fourth quarterly conference with the proposi¬ 
tion that, when they had 250 storehouse tithers, 
all auxiliary methods of finance, duplex envelopes 
and free will offerings excepted, would be aban¬ 
doned. The 250 members were enrolled during 
the budget canvass of 1918. The number has 
now grown, March 1st, 1922, to 400 members, 
including 150 children, and has an average in¬ 
come of approximately $1,000.00 per month. 

Then came the Centenary campaign of the 



62 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


Methodist Episcopal Church, the most ambitious 
financial undertaking of any denomination in the 
long history of the Christian Church, with its new 
emphasis upon stewardship, and its call for a mil¬ 
lion tithers in Methodism. 

In the meantime, the author had been trans¬ 
ferred to the Superintendency of the Oneonta 
District in the same conference. As the time for 
the concerted stewardship campaign drew near, it 
is recalled that one enthusiastic village pastor an¬ 
ticipated the event by several weeks, and sent in a 
glowing account of nineteen tithing stewards en¬ 
rolled—including all of his leading families. A 
fezv weeks later the Centenary canvass was a 
dismal failure in that church. Eighteen months 
have passed since those stewardship cards were 
signed but every attempt to get those tithers to 
function has been successfully evaded. 

Another pastor reported twenty-eight signa¬ 
tures, but nothing happened. Subscriptions were 
no larger and payments were no more prompt. 
Six months later the Superintendent visited that 
charge and attempted to organize a storehouse 
association. Just two of those covenant signers 
joined, one of whom was the pastor. 

One of the largest churches on this district or¬ 
ganized a Tithers' Association, but not on the 
storehouse plan. The tithers had specially 
numbered envelopes, and each number was cred¬ 
ited with all sums paid into the treasury of the 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 63 


church. The receipts of this association, when 
compared with equal numbers of tithers in other 
churches organized on the storehouse plan, were 
practically negligible. The situation grew so un¬ 
satisfactory that an attempt was made to organize 
a storehouse association. Twenty-four signatures 
were secured, and things began to happen right 
away. The first month these 24 members paid 
$227.47, a per capita of $9.47! Two months 
later the 24 storehouse tithers paid $142.82, and 
the 46 non-storehouse tithers $32.33. The next 
month 23 storehouse tithers paid $ 338 . 50 , and the 
46, $ 30 . 03 . Five months later this church had 37 
storehouse tithers, and 17 on the individual basis; 
the former paid $359.94, and the latter $14.79. 
A per capita of $9.72 for the storehouse tithers, 
and .87 for the individual tithers! * It would be 
impossible to find a more illuminating illustration 
of the superiority of storehouse tithing. 

A Baptist church had an association of 64 
members, not on the storehouse plan. Finally, 
24 of the 64 organized on the storehouse plan. 
The pastor stated that those who did not join the 
storehouse association were of superior financial 
ability. The first month the 24 storehouse tith¬ 
ers paid $212.06, or a per capita of $8.85; while 

* These figures have been taken from the columns of 
The Storehouse Advocate, a bi-monthly stewardship paper 
published by the Stewardship Commission of the Wyoming 
Annual Conference, and can be verified by referring to its 
statistical tables. 




64 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


the 42 non-storehouse tithers paid $166.00, or 
a per capita of $4.15. Twenty-four non¬ 
storehouse tithers were immediately made twice 
as valuable to their church by becoming store¬ 
house tithers! 

The author, as the editor of The Storehouse 
Advocate has received many letters like the 
following: 

“ We have eighty-four enrolled tithers in our 
church, but do not seem to be getting along very 
well. We are not growing in numbers, and there 
is nothing to show that we are tithing, that is, 
nothing but the private accounts of the tithers 
We would like to know something about store¬ 
house tithing. Please send some literature about 
plans for an organization in a local church.” 

This letter was from the pastor of a church 
with more than one thousand members. He had 
enrolled about the average number of tithers in a 
church of that size—nearly 10 per cent. And 
there it had stopped. 

Or take this letter from a mid-continent pastor 
with a membership of over two thousand: 

“ I am in despair about our 185 Christian 
Stewards. Is there anything we can do beyond 
simply pledging them to the principle? I have 
heard something about a plan to organize the 
tithers fostered by your conference. Will you 
please send me whatever literature you may have ? 
I cannot believe that my people are not tithing, 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 65 


but I positively know that very little of it is 
coming into the church.” 

Can a more distressing situation be imagined? 
The minimum tithe of the 185 on the storehouse 
plan would have been $9,250.00—about as much 
as the two thousand, including the 185 non¬ 
storehouse tithers, are giving at this time! 

Here is another letter from a perplexed west¬ 
ern pastor: 

“ I am enclosing stamps for the pamphlets on 
storehouse tithing. While I know something 
about it, yet it may be the solution, as your con¬ 
ference is working it out, for the tithing plan. I 
have felt keenly that something was wrong. East 
year, at the Annual Conference, I reported the 
largest tithing list in the area, and one of the 
largest in Methodism—350 in the first church. 
Yet aside from an easier securing of money, I 
honestly cannot see where it all has gone! Hence 
my anxiety to know of any plan that will con¬ 
serve the results of tithing campaigns.” 

Three hundred and fifty signed Christian stew¬ 
ards, * and yet the pastor—who ought to know— 
says he “ honestly ” does not know where it has 
gone. 

Does not this situation illustrate a double truth: 
Many people will subscribe to any kind of a 
theory so long as no attempt will be made to put 
it in operation; and that no theory, however good, 
is self-operative? 




66 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


What a pity these 350 Christian Stewards did 
not have a chance to get started right. That 
large group probably contains enough men and 
women of high character, deep consecration, and 
financial ability to have given that church a place 
of pre-eminence among the Protestant Churches 
of the world—if its enrolled tithers had been 
organized on the storehouse basis. The failure 
of individual tithers to function is a failure of 
plan and not a break-down of character. The 
logic of storehouse tithing together with its public 
records, prove that conclusively. 

One Methodist church in Philadelphia, Pa., had 
enrolled 164 Christian Stewards. Some fourteen 
months later an effort was made to organize a 
storehouse association. At a largely attended 
questionnaire on Sunday afternoon, the treasurer 
of the church got up and said that he did not 
believe in tithing; that more than a year ago 164 
people in that church had signed a tithing cove¬ 
nant, and that he knew from personal knowledge 
that they had given less money to the church than 
before they had signed those cards! 

Maybe no special significance is to be attached 
to that statement, but to us it has a significance 
both doleful and dreadful. Although that treas¬ 
urer must have made that statement in the pres¬ 
ence of scores of people to whom his remarks 
personally applied, yet it went entirely unchal¬ 
lenged. Why were not those tithers able to con- 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 67 


tradict him? Every one of them must have had 
personal reasons for suspecting that he was telling 
the truth!! 

Recently the author had several significant con¬ 
versations with pastors in neighboring communi¬ 
ties. One had a membership of over 900 with 200 
Christian Stewards. No, they were not organ¬ 
ized. No, he did not know how much they had 
paid into the church the previous year. No, there 
had been no marked increase in the income of the 
church after they had signed the tithing pledge. 
Yes, the church had always met its obligations 
before there were any Christian Stewards, and it 
had always done so since. No, the ministerial 
budget had not grown, and there had been no 
surplus. With two hundred tithers on the indi¬ 
vidual administrative basis the church had just 
barely kept its head above water— the same as 
always! 

The other pastor had an association, but on the 
limited storehouse plan. No, he did not know 
what the income had been for the previous month. 
No, he could not recall what it had been for the 
past year. He was very sorry, but he really could 
not remember just how the funds were divided. 
Why, he thought the association had a treasurer, 
but really he did not know what its receipts 
had been. Yes, to tell the truth, he did not 
know very much about its affairs. (And so 
forth and so on, until the questioner, in sheer 



68 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


pity for the growing embarrassment of his friend, 
desisted.) 

A moment’s reflection, so it would seem, ought 
to convince the advocates of unorganized tithing 
that it can never be made effective in any large 
way. Tithing has not been the practice of the 
modern world. The idea seems new, uncongenial, 
and drastic. It touches us where we are most 
sensitive, our purses, and where we have been 
most unsystematic, our support of the church. 
Tithing asks us to do what we have never thought 
we either could do or would do if we could. Tith¬ 
ing means paying from four to nine times as 
much as we have been giving. It means doing 
what the majority of our fellow Christians will, 
perhaps, flatly refuse to do, and what they will 
condemn in us if we attempt. Accepting an invi¬ 
tation to sign a tithing covenant is not, therefore, 
equivalent to accepting an invitation to go on a 
picnic where the ride and refreshments are free! 

Tithing, like the moral change involved in con¬ 
version, means that the life will be lifted to a 
higher level. We always like to surround a con¬ 
vert with converts. To send him adrift without 
the friendly sympathy and assistance of those who 
have travelled the same way, usually ends in dis¬ 
aster. If the convert can touch elbows immedi¬ 
ately with some who are passing through the same 
initiatory experiences, and with others who have 
long had their faces toward Zion, the probability 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 69 


of steadfastness will be greatly enhanced. We 
would condemn the church which did much to 
secure but nothing to retain its converts. The 
tither, like the convert, needs to touch elbows with 
fellow-tithers immediately. He may be able to 
stand alone, and carry out his pledge in the face 
of indifference and even opposition. If he is just 
an ordinary mortal (as most of us are) he will 
probably give up the attempt after a longer or 
shorter trial. 

But if he can be surrounded with a compact 
group of actual tithers in the local church; with 
the pledge to pay his tithe—his full tithe—as soon 
as it has been earned and received; with the 
knowledge that others are doing exactly what he 
is doing; with the inspiration that will come from 
the achievements of this combined tithe, he will 
soon become a happy, life-long tither. Why 
should not the church be just as anxious to retain 
and develop its tithing converts as it is its intel¬ 
lectual and moral converts? 

The Protestant church has shown a genius for 
organization—except when it comes to its finan¬ 
cial resources. Storehouse tithing is the first 
attempt to supply this deficiency. Notice the care 
with which the church provides for the religious 
education of its children, the training of its young 
converts, and the many organizations in which it 
seeks to enroll its men and women. Indeed, the 
church is content to drift nowhere—except when 



70 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


it comes to financing its own existence. It has 
shown subtle skill in meeting critical emergencies, 
but is non-plussed when it faces its own empty 
treasury. It is traceable to the fact that human 
cupidity has been substituted for the Divine deci¬ 
sion. God and the church do not let us decide 
how good we want to be. The ten commandments 
(God and the Church) tell us how good we must 
he! God and the—(no, we dare not write it, for 
here the church seems strangely unwilling to link 
itself up with God). Let us try again: God sets 
the standard for Kngdom support before His 
ancient, modem, universal Israel; but the church, 
shaking its head doubtingly, substitutes a variable 
for God’s invariable standard, and one that is ex¬ 
actly gauged to suit the ignorance and selfishness 
of the human heart. 

And now, since the church shows a disposition 
to return to the Divine plan, will it make the co¬ 
lossal blunder of teaching the principle while 
neglecting to provide for its practice? 

Has not the church learned, by two thousand 
years of bitter experience, that accepting a prin¬ 
ciple and putting it into practice is not one but 
two things; that the second is always the more 
difficult of the two. The American Secretary of 
State, Charles Evans Hughes, delighted the world 
at the recent convening of the disarmament con¬ 
ference in Washington, D. C., with his proposal 
for a ten year’s naval building holiday for a war- 



WHEN AND HOW TO BE PAID? 71 


weary and a debt-burdened world. And the de¬ 
light was none the less keen when the representa¬ 
tives of the great nations arose, one after another, 
and announced, in the names of their respective 
governments, the acceptance of Secretary Hughes* 
proposition “ in principle.** 

But why did not the Conference adjourn at 
once? Was not its work done? Here were 
negotiators who had travelled half way round the 
world, and now, having achieved all they had 
hoped for in the opening hour of the conference, 
why could they not start on the return journey 
to-morrow? Was it because the nations, wiser 
than the church, knew that something more than 
the theoretical acceptance of a principle was 
necessary. Weary weeks and even months 
dragged by and the conference which had long 
since settled the matter “ in principle ** was still 
in session trying to settle it “ in practice.** Some 
of the prominent negotiators were called home; 
but no matter, the conference had to go on until 
practical methods for applying the principle 
already accepted had been found! 

Is the church to make the mistake that the 
nations did not make at the disarmament confer¬ 
ence, namely, adjourning its activities as soon as 
its people have accepted the tithe “ in principle *’ ? 
If it does it will have none but itself to blame for 
the inevitable disappointment it will soon face. 

Jehovah commanded His people to tithe and * 



72 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


provided a place for the tithe to be paid. Teach¬ 
ing the tithe without teaching the tither how and 
where to pay his tithe would be immeasurable 
folly. 






VI 

The Storehouse Covenant 

T HE writer, through the intercession of the 
Rev. Gervaise Roughton, for a quarter of 
a century the pastor of the Wesley Chapel 
Methodist Episcopal Church, Cincinnati, Ohio, 
has persuaded Mr. Wm. G. Roberts to write the 
following account of the origin of this movement. 
Mr. Roberts fails to state that his lips first sug¬ 
gested the plan, and that his hand wrote the first 
covenant, but such is the case. His account 
follows: 


“In May, A.D., 1895, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Fraser Clark 
invited Rev. and Mrs. J. W. Magruder, Mr. and Mrs. W. D. 
Yerger, and Mr. and Mrs. W. G. Roberts, to spend the day at 
their home on Kennedy Heights, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, for 
the purpose of considering what could be done for the betterment 
of the condition of their local church home, the Wesley Chapel 
Methodist Episcopal Church. Those persons named being the 
minister and hi» wife, and the others holding the official relations 
of Class Leaders, Stewards, and Trustees, eight persons in all. 

“ The season was very mild and the lawn covered with grass, 
and out in the open the spring day was beautiful. 

“ After spending the morning and enjoying a very pleasant 
noon-^day meal in the house, and conversation on the porches until 
about two o’clock in the afternoon, all agreed to go out on the 
lawn and consider the matter of the present •condition of their 
church. 

“ Wesley Chapel was now a down-town church, which meant 
that the more prosperous of its members had moved off to the 
hills, and that the residue were largely the humbler of the work¬ 
ing class and tenants, often moving so frequently that they could 
not be properly instructed in the Word of God. The former sub¬ 
stantial membership had been replaced, in part, by those who were 


73 


74 STOREHOUSE TITHING 


very unstable, so that numerically, financially, and spiritually the 
church had been shorn of the sources of strength. 

“ This company took up all the causes of the dearth that had 
come upon thei«r local church, and the seeming impossibility of 
keeping up the financial requirements for local maintenance. The 
benevolences at this time were quite trivial, while constant appeals 
and extra efforts including suppers, festivals, lectures, stereopticon 
shows, subscriptions, and the whole round of man-made plans, 
schemes, and devises, had been able to secure only a meagre 
maintenance, and even this was clearly diminishing, so that it was 
said that if a few more of its members should die or move out 
the church property would have to be sold. 

“ It was the opinion of those present that every expedient had 
been exhausted, and no one could suggest a plan to better the 
conditions that had not already been tried. Always, after a plan 
had been suggested, there seemed to appear the legend, * weighed 
in the balance and found wanting.’ 

“ Then, as th* company was about to break up, having failed to 
find a solution, one member said: * I have been a steward for 
about 25 years in the Methodist church, a class leader, and a local 
preacher, and we have always had these conditions to deal with, 
and I suppose it was always so and always will be so.’ 

“Another said, ‘We have not tried all the plans ever heard of.’ 
At once several asked, * What is there we have not tried? Please 
tell us.’ 

“The answer was, ‘God’s Plan, TITHING!’ Several an¬ 
swered, ‘ why, we all are tithers.’ The little company was in¬ 
terrogated, and all said that they had given a tenth for many 
years, and several said that they had not stopped with the first 
tenth. 

“ ‘ But,’ persisted the one who suggested God’s Plan of tithing, 
* do I understand that you have kept a book account with the 
Tithe of God, and that you have brought all the tithes into the 
storehouse?’ 

“ Then, on personal examination, it was found that all had kept 
account of the tenth, BUT NOT ONE HAD BROUGHT ALL 
THE TITHES INTO THE STOREHOUSE, but had distributed 
it to all sorts o* things that come under the name of church and 
charity, with the result that God’s treasury was always empty. 

“ * Then,’ insisted the same one, * We have not tried God’s 
Plan, and God tells us through Malachi that we are a set of 
robbers, every one of us, and that He will take the curse off of 
us if we will stop stealing His Tithes, and bring them all into the 
storehouse. All man made plans have failed us. If there is one 
person in this company who will clasp hands with me in covenant 
relation with God to bring all the tithes into the storehouse, let 
him do so, and if God be God, he will keep His word, or else 
there is no God.’ 

“ There followed a short, earnest talk, when one reached forth 




THE STOREHOUSE COVENANT 75 


his hand and th* covenant was made, all then joining in it. Three 
of the members were then designated to write a covenant, but 
after several days the committee requested that the one who had 
suggested the plan should write the covenant. He consented, and 
after much earnest prayer a blank book was obtained, and the 
covenant was written, as he believes, under the direct inspiration 
and in the very language given him by the Holy Spirit. It was 
written at one sitting, without notes or drafts of any kind, without 
reconstruction, and has remained unchanged to this day, January 31, 
1922. To this covenant, then presented, the names of the others 
were then subscribed. 

“ The covenant * was written at 601 East Third Street, Cin¬ 
cinnati, Ohio. The book with the written covenant was brought 
to the next Wednesday evening prayer meeting. At the close of 
the service, the pastor, the Rev. J. W. Magruder, briefly extended 
the privilege of entering into the agreement, stating that those who 
desired to do so could see the committee, and hear the reading of 
God’s Plan for financing His church. 

“ Those present of the original company agreeing to the cove¬ 
nant, had the privilge of signing the covenant first. These eight 
persons, commencing with the pastor as number one, and his wife 
as number two, signed at once. Then the committee began to 
present the covenant to their fellow members, earnestly desiring 
them to study the word of God, pray over it, and, if convinced 
that it was God’s plan, to sign the covenant. 

“ Four hundred and thirty-seven have signed this covenant to 
date. Many have gone to Heaven, and many have gone to other 
fields of labor and residence. Yet from the time when the 
covenant was first taken to this present time, Wesley Chapel has 
never had a debt; her conference benevolences were vastly in¬ 
creased, while the ministerial support was divided into 62 weeks 
and paid each Monday morning. She has gone safely through all 
financial panics, increasing constantly in numbers, in spirituality, 
and in financial ability. The banner of Jehovah still floats over 
His little fortress, where His people hold that He is the God of 
Truth, and never breaks His covenant with those that fully trust 
Him.” 

The church for centuries to come will be under 
obligation to Mr. Wm. G. Roberts and the men 
and women associated with him for this venture 
all the way forward to God's Plan. While the 

* While this covenant is essentially different from the one found 
on page 77, yet it was the first storehouse covenant ever written. 
To Mr. Roberts belongs the credit of projecting the idea into the 
mind of the church. 





76 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


example of Wesley Chapel was followed, in part 
or in whole, in some neighboring churches and 
neighboring states, yet it did not secure wide and 
persistent publicity. 

When, on Lord’s Day, December 12, 1915, one 
hundred and twenty-five people walked down the 
aisle of the Geneva Methodist Episcopal Church, 
in response to the call of their pastor, the Rev. 
Ralph S. Cushman, D.D., for those who would 
covenant to bring their full tithe into the store¬ 
house, a new chapter was opened in the history 
of the movement to bring the church forward to 
God’s plan for financing His church. 

An indebtedness of more than $82,000 rested 
on this church; the annual budget called for 
$12,000 for maintenance and interest; the can¬ 
vass had been made, leaving the church only eight 
thousand miles (dollars) from its goal! 

In less than thirty days those 125 storehouse 
tithers had lifted the church from the depths of 
despair to the heights of victory. The debt was 
still there, but God had opened a passage through 
the raging sea of debt. The pursuing Egyptians 
with their mortgages and notes were no longer 
feared. The morale of the church had been re¬ 
stored. All knew that some day they would 
stand on the other shore, and dry shod. The 
story of what had happened at Geneva soon found 
its way into the church press and created a pro¬ 
found impression. 



THE STOREHOUSE COVENANT 77 


When Dr. Cushman took charge of the Stew¬ 


ardship Division 



Centenary Commis¬ 


sion of the Methodist Episcopal Church, although 
storehouse tithing was not featured, yet the store¬ 
house covenant,* as finally evolved in the Geneva 
church, was widely circulated throughout the 
denomination. This covenant, with some minor 
changes, follows: 


I. In loving loyalty to our Lord and as an acknowledgment of 
His ownership, we covenant to pay the tithe of our income for the 
purpose of maintaining and extending the Kingdom of God. 

II. We do covenant with God that we will bring His portion, 
the full tenth of our income, into the Storehouse, that, as He has 
commanded, “ there may b« meat in mine house ” for the building 
of the kingdom. 

III. We agree that this money shall be cared for by the 
Treasurer of the Storehouse Tithers’ Association, and divided, by 
vote of the association, upon the recommendation of the Executive 
Committee, proportionately between the support of the gospel, the 
various benevolent enterprises of the church, and other work of 
the kingdom, as shall be agreed upon by the association. 

IV. We further agree in that liberty which is in Christ, in 
case of unusual tithe, or special Divine leading, any individual 
shall deem it necessary to direct the division of his tenth, that he 
may be permitted to do so by written order on the treasurer, a 
full record of such transaction to be kept on the books of the 
association. 

V. We further agree that having entered into this covenant, we 
will not be under obligation to sign any additional subscription, 
or pledge for any church work or benevolence. Our dues to any 
of the authorized church organizations to which we may belong 
will be paid by the treasurer of the Tithers’ Association out of the 
tithe money on written orders approved by the executive commit¬ 
tee. But in case we make additional contributions “ according as 
the Lord hath prospered us,” they will be regarded as free will or 
thank offerings. 


* This covenant was one of the official documents issued 
by the joint Centenary Commission of the Methodist Epis¬ 
copal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 
and re-issued by the Committee on Conservation and Ad¬ 
vance of the Methodist Episcopal Church in January, 1922. 





78 STOREHOUSE TITHING 


Exposition of the Storehouse Covenant: 

(I) This covenant proceeds upon the assump¬ 
tion of the Divine ownership. All we have and 
are belong to God by virtue of creation, preserva¬ 
tion, and redemption. We are users, not creators. 
We go out as we came into the world, penniless, 
unclothed strangers. To recognize this as an 
academic truth is one thing, to reduce it to a fact 
in daily practice, including the entire circle of our 
income, is quite another! Everything was here 
when we came, and everything will be left when 
we go, and yet our fate in eternity will depend 
upon how we used or abused the things of time 
and sense. 

(II) “ The full tenth.into the store¬ 

house.” This is the crux of the covenant, its one 
difficulty and its chief glory. But why not ? To 
whom does the tithe belong? To you? Not if 
God knew what He was talking about! “ All the 

tithe.is the Lord’s.” That was not said 

by an ancient conclave of puzzled ecclesiastics 
who did not know how to finance the kingdom. 
God said it! Has he changed His mind? If so, 
to whom has He imparted the information? A 
decree can be revoked only by the issuing author¬ 
ity—unless that authority is lost; a law can be 
repealed only by the enacting legislature—unless 
it is abolished or overthrown. Has God been 
dethroned? Has His authority lapsed with the 
passing centuries? If God is God, what He said 





THE STOREHOUSE COVENANT 79 


one thousand years, or two thousand years, or 
five thousand years ago. He says to-day. God 
never solves the same problem twice, because He 
always solves it right the first time. As long as 
the same conditions exist the Divine solution, once 
given, stands forever! 

Moreover, at the end of the month to whom 
does the rent for the house in which you have 
lived belong? Have you the right to keep it in 
your pocket as long as you wish, and then dis¬ 
tribute it where and when you please, giving your 
landlord such portions as you see fit? 

Why should you assume to do with your Lord's 
property what you would not think of doing with 
your landlord's rent? Is it because you have 
greater respect for the latter than love for the 
former? Or is it because you fear the sheriff and 
the scorn of your neighbors more than the dis¬ 
pleasure of Jehovah? Is it not the secrecy at¬ 
tached to the one and the publicity that must go 
with the other, that encourages so many to do to 
God what they would be ashamed to do to their 
landlord? 

You are not the steward of that which you do 
not own, and have not the right to keep, handle, 
or invest. You are the steward of the nine- 
tenths, but not of the first tenth. That is, if God 
was not mistaken when He said: “ All the 

tithe...is the Lord’s.” What you do with 

the nine-tenths determines whether you are a 




80 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


good, careless, or a wicked steward. What you 
do with the first tenth determines—when you 
once know the law—whether you are honest 
toward God, or otherwise. 

“ We do covenant with God that we will bring 
His portion, the full tenth of our income, into the 
storehouse,” is a decision of the highest impor¬ 
tance. While no time is specified, yet the meaning 
is immediately, or as soon thereafter as possible. 
The Lord’s tithe was always paid first, first fruits, 
and firstlings of fields, flocks, and herds. Rents, 
railway fares, taxes, and a thousand other things 
can be paid because there is a definite time when 
they must be paid. All of God’s children can tithe 
when they learn to pay the tithe upon the receipt 
of the income. God’s portion is a first charge 
against the income, not a fag-end left over after 
necessary and unnecessary personal and family 
expenditures, and even luxuries and foolish ex¬ 
travagances have been subtracted. God never 
designed that His portion should be paid out of 
the surplus—if there happened to be one. That 
comes first, not secondly or fifty-seventhly. And 
God’s tithe should be where God’s tithe belongs, 
in His treasury, and not in the pocket of an 
individual to whom it does not belong. 

“ That there may be meat in mine house,” and 
there always is—when God’s tithe is in its desig¬ 
nated place. Storehouse tithing, when practiced 
by a fair proportion of the membership of a 




THE STOREHOUSE COVENANT 81 


church, fills every treasury, pays every bill, and 
always leaves a comfortable surplus; changing the 
church from mendicant to benefactor, and from 
a beggar of alms to a bestower of benefices. 

(Ill) The Executive Committee, which always 
includes the pastor, have the power of recom¬ 
mendation only. Proposed expenditures must be 
presented to this committee. This prevents need¬ 
less discussion, and impulsive, ill-advised action. 
The association, however, is the final judge of 
each case. 

Each association is free to divide its income as 
it pleases. This division, where there is no build¬ 
ing enterprise or burdensome debt, is as follows: 
40 per cent for the budget, (including all items 
for the support of the local church), 40 per cent 
for the denominational benevolences, and twenty 
per cent for the contingent fund. The dry rot of 
selfishness should be avoided in the division of the 
tithe. The benevolent portion, except in extra¬ 
ordinary cases, should not be less than 40 per 
cent, and should never be permitted, under any 
circumstances, to sink below 30 per cent. Paring 
down our obligation to the unsaved world is not 
the open sesame to the Divine favor. 

The “ contingent fund ” is just what its name 
implies, a 20 per cent reserve fund for con¬ 
tingencies. How is it used ? To pay the dues of 
the members of the Association to the various 
societies in the church, such as the Ladies’ Aid 




82 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


Society, the Women’s Foreign and Home Mis¬ 
sionary Societies, the expenses—when the Associ¬ 
ation is sufficiently representative—of the Sunday 
School, and to help such outside organizations as 
the Anti-Saloon Teague, the Y. M. and Y. W. 
C. A., the Salvation Army, also any local benevo¬ 
lence for which a subscription is being taken in 
the community, or foreign need such as Armenian 
or Chinese relief. 

Will a contingent fund of 20 per cent be suf¬ 
ficient? It will be enough and to spare. The 
writer is acquainted with the life story of at 
least 200 storehouse associations, some more than 
four years old, and all in existence at the time this 
was written. These conclusions are based upon 
their experience. 

(IV) This is one of the most important sec¬ 
tions of the covenant and, while not often 
utilized, removes the last objection for any one 
who thinks he will not be satisfied with the 
regular division of the funds decided upon by the 
Association, for 

(a) If he thinks his tithe is larger than the 
local church needs, or will use to advantage, he 
can disregard entirely the decision of the associ¬ 
ation, and direct how every penny that he pays 
into the Association shall be spent. This is his 
right, inherent in the covenant, and cannot be 
abridged by the Association. He can either give 
the treasurer permanent directions as to the dis- 



THE STOREHOUSE COVENANT 83 


tribution of his tithe, or he may direct how each 
portion of his tithe shall be divided. 

( b ) Disregarding entirely the size of the tithe, 
if any member of the Association is conscious of 
“ special Divine leading,” and feels that he should 
have the liberty to “ direct the division of his 
tenth ” he “ may be permitted to do so by written 
order to the treasurer.” This privilege is not 
granted by vote of the Association. It belongs to 
him by right of the covenant. His order to the 
treasurer is sufficient to complete the transaction. 

(V) This needs no elucidation, and simply 
means that the payment of the tithe is the first 
limit of financial responsibility for the welfare of 
the kingdom. 




VII 

Advantages of the Storehouse Plan 

I T is a thoroughly digested, widely tested plan. 
Its provisions are few, definite, and workable. 
It either succeeds or fails immediately. You 
do not have to wait six weeks, or six months, or 
six years to know how it will work or what it 
will do. If its provisions are accepted in theory 
while denied in fact, it will be known at once. It 
is never a lingering success or a long drawn out 
failure. Thirty or sixty days will be long enough 
to determine whether the fiber of the theoretical 
tithers in your church is sufficiently fine and 
strong to stand the storehouse test. 

It provides a time for the actual beginning of 
the payment of the full tithe. A time—a definite 
time— for beginning. That is all important. 
Occasionally we awake with a start to realize that 
the good we had intended to do can never be done 
because we have waited too long to begin. We all 
like to think that we are going to do just the right 
thing—sometime in the future. Not to-day, of 
course, hardly to-morrow, nor yet this week, but 
some sweet day “ bye and bye.” Most of us die 
before that “ sweet day ” dawns. That is the 
tragedy of life. It is probable that the lonely, 


84 


ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 85 


individual tither stumbles here. He does not have 
to begin at once. It may not seem convenient or 
possible to do so. There is no urgency about the 
matter. He is pledge free as to time and place. 
Has he not a perfect right to consult his own 
judgment and convenience? Next month, ah, 
then he will begin! But when a group of Chris¬ 
tians agree to begin to tithe their incomes on the 
first day of January, 1922, pledging themselves 
to bring the full tithe into the storehouse Sabbath 
by Sabbath, that is an end to all hesitation. By 
the thirty-first of the month every one has had a 
taste of real tithing. In a few months each one 
is a seasoned tither. 

It will mean the actual testing of the only plan 
that God ever gave for financing His kingdom. 
Mr. Roberts was right, after the futility of all 
suggested and tested plans for saving Wesley 
Chapel had been admitted, that there was one 
plan that had not been tried. They tried it, and 
Wesley Chapel, about to die, still lives. The 
practice of this plan will soon show whether 
people can tithe, whether they can afford it, and 
what co-operative tithing will accomplish. If you 
have one hundred individual tithers in your 
church, one thousand guesses as to what they are 
doing with their tithe will leave the question un¬ 
answered; but if you have one dozen storehouse 
tithers in your local church, you will not only 
know whether they are tithing, but where their 



86 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


combined tithe is being used. In other words a 
storehouse association always reduces tithing to a 
fait accompli instead of a “ hope deferred that 
maketh the heart sick.” 

It cultivates the systematic payment of the 
tithe. We do not easily acquire good habits, es¬ 
pecially new ones. Careless or bad habits can 
only be supplanted by better ones systematically 
practiced. If we are simply going to pay tithes 
sometime, somewhere, it will be a good deal like 
the old plan of paying anything, anytime, any¬ 
where. Tithing, to be done successfully, must 
not be done occasionally, spasmodically, but regu¬ 
larly. The Storehouse tither soon becomes ac¬ 
climated, and tithing one of the regular, delightful 
habits of life. An accumulating, unused tithe is 
a scriptural anomaly and a dangerous fact. The 
Jew paid his tithe promptly, at the place ap¬ 
pointed . It was not his to be hoarded. God 
provided for its immediate use. An unused tithe 
is a misplaced trust fund. Its appeal to the cupid¬ 
ity of the tithe payer will be irresistible. If the 
reserve tithe is large, why add to it? And if it is 
large, why not keep it so? And the easiest way 
to keep it large is to be slow about getting rid 
of it! The individual tithe treasury should be 
just large enough to hold the tithe one week or 
month—as it is earned—and then completely 
emptied. Frequent accountings make the tither 
of much more account to God, the church, and 




ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 87 


himself. Storehouse tithing emphasizes the use 
of envelopes instead of account books. Dealing 
square with God, and keeping squared up with 
God is its goal. 

Storehouse tithing soon creates enthusiasm for 
the tithing system. The lonely tither may know 
at the end of the month how much he has paid. 
But he does not know whether other tithers have 
paid, or the sum total of their combined tithe. 
He may enjoy the approval of his own conscience 
—and that is much—but he knows nothing of the 
enthusiasm of a group of tithers when they stand 
astonished at the size of their co-operative tithe. 
The smiles on the faces of storehouse tithers 
when the receipts of the first month are made 
public, seem to indicate that each one had received 
an unexpected legacy. But there is always a 
latent fear that the first record can never be re¬ 
peated. As month after month passes and the 
early high water mark is passed again and again, 
and is occasionally doubled or even trebled, as 
special tithes are paid, interest and astonishment 
are widespread throughout the community, while 
the joy of the tithers is unbounded. 

Storehouse tithing means that the full tithe of 
every member will pass through the channels of 
the church. We do not know a single pastor, any¬ 
where, in any denomination, who has been satis¬ 
fied with the results of unorganized tithing. Such 
doubtless exist, many of them, and we by no 




88 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


means assert that unorganized tithing must 
always fail. But personal knowledge and cor¬ 
respondence indicate that it has not registered the 
high success anticipated. It does not so much 
seem to be a question of payment as of misdi¬ 
rected use. One pastor writes that a group of his 
young people, who had signed the tithe covenant, 
were saving it for a two weeks’ stay at a popular 
summer resort, and were quite indignant when he 
attempted to point out their error. Another said 
that his leading tither (?) was devoting most of 
his tithe to getting his boy through college. Still 
another pastor states that one of his best tithers, 
a very dear personal friend to whom he did not 
feel free to speak, was using his tithe to support 
his mother-in-law! His heart was in the right 
place but he was getting his money from the 
wrong place. Individual tithers fall easy victims 
to religious fakirs —or seem to, at least. We per¬ 
sonally know a number of such, one in particular 
whose husband said that his wife would do just 
as much good with her tithe if she scattered it 
broadcast in the highway. “ Yes, more,” (his 
exact words) “ for then some of it would fall into 
the hands of people who either needed it or would 
make good use of it.” Storehouse tithing stops 
such wanton waste. It also honors the church 
by making it the channel through which the 
alms of its members reach the world. The 
stamp of the church is always on such checks, 



ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 89 


and attention is called to the existence and power 
of the church. 

Storehouse tithing takes advantage of the gre¬ 
garious instinct in human nature. People of like 
opinions, aims, and practices do not have to be 
pushed—they gravitate together. We desire fel¬ 
lowship with those traveling in our direction as 
eagerly as water searches for its level. How can 
isolated, individual tithers be mutually helpful? 
They have nothing in common, except a theory. 
Experience shows that they are very “ touchy ” 
about its practical application. The writer has 
dear friends who are tithers, but he has not one 
who has ever volunteered a statement as to what 
he really did with his tithe. He has never asked, 
of course. And his friends have felt, of course, 
that what they did with their tithe was their indi¬ 
vidual matter. Ah, that is just the difference 
between the individual and the storehouse tither. 
It is impossible to disentangle one’s self from 
the sense of ownership as long as the tithe is 
retained, while storehouse tithing, separating the 
tither completely from his tithe, makes the Divine 
ownership a fait accompli. 

Storehouse tithers have nothing in controversy 
and much in common. The amazing accomplish¬ 
ments of the co-operative tithe form inspiring 
topics of conversation. They meet on terms of 
equality and fellowship in the business and activi¬ 
ties of their Association. The publicity given to 



90 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


the fact that they are tithers, and their member¬ 
ship in an association of real tithers, help to keep 
them true to the principle and practice of the tithe. 
Individual tithers in the same church may or may 
not know each other. There can be little ex¬ 
change of ideas and sympathy between them. 
Each one is concealed by a barrier of secrecy, 
and isolated by a rampart of independence—and 
that without profit to himself, or benefit to the 
principles he cherishes, and at regrettable cost to 
the kingdom. It is that kind of independence 
that makes the church dependent . 

Individual tithing, even when successfully ac¬ 
complished, has not changed the status of the 
church—it is still a beggar. 

If every member of a local church tithed on 
the individual plan the problem of taking an 
anuual budget would still have to be faced, and 
every tither would have to be individually per¬ 
suaded to donate a part of the Lord's tithe to His 
work! And he would still have the right to say 
how much, and where, and when he would pay of 
the Lord's tithe toward the Lord's work. Beg¬ 
gars would still have to go from door to door, 
knocking timidly, waiting patiently, returning per¬ 
sistently, asking deferentially, and taking thank¬ 
fully—what the tither was pleased to give of the 
money that did not belong to him! 

We believe that such a group would give more 
because they were tithers, but who knows how 




ADVANTAGES OE THE PEAN 91 


much more, or how long they would give it? 
What others gave, and not their tithe, would be 
the measure of their giving. Do you not see that 
the old method (begging) and the old standard 
(what others gave)—both reprehensible—would 
eternally persist ? There would still be the same 
annoying tendency to keep the budget as low as 
possible, and the same distracting self-assertive¬ 
ness which is the bane of the church. 

But the church beggar goes out of the back 
door when storehouse tithing comes in at the 
front door. No argument is necessary to get the 
storehouse tither to part with his tithe. As regu¬ 
larly as the dew falls or the sun rises that comes 
into the storehouse. Not in part, mind you, but 
the whole. There is no retention of the tithe 
while the tither is trying to decide where it 
shall go. 

There may be an occasional sermon on God’s 
method of kingdom support, but of old fashioned, 
vociferous, joke-lubricated public begging, a 
storehouse church knows nothing. Storehouse 
churches very generally dispense with the col¬ 
lection plates, since the unobtrusive payment of 
the full tithe renders all devices unnecessary. We 
will find out a little later what it means to have 
from twenty-five to three hundred people paying 
from four to nine times as much to the church 
as they formerly gave; and to pay it regularly, 
Sabbath after Sabbath, and year after year, with- 



92 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


out complaining, coaxing, boasting, or the 
haughty assumption of privileges based upon 
“ excessive ” generosity. Talk about a distant 
millenium to a long harassed finance committee, 
distracted church treasurer, or timid pastor who 
has long fretted over the endless deficiencies of 
existing methods of church finance—where there 
is a strong storehouse association the millenium 
is not to be, it is! 

Storehouse tithing does not ask how much the 
church budget is, and then assume the right to sit 
in judgment on it—sitting “ on ” is right! The 
whole tithe is laid down where it belongs—at the 
feet of the Master. Instead of asking how much 
the church needs, whether it cannot get along 
with less, and how does it happen that more and 
more is asked, storehouse tithing quietly proceeds 
to fill the treasury to overflowing. Instead of cut¬ 
ting the budget to fit a diminishing income, it 
automatically expands the budget to fit an enlarg¬ 
ing outgo. (A condition undreamed of anywhere 
except in storehouse churches.) Storehouse tith¬ 
ing automatically transforms the church, at once, 
from a halting mendicant with apologetic mien 
and palsied hand extended for an alms, to an 
alert, clear eyed, quick functioning spiritual 
teacher and helper of the man who lives in the 
house by the side of the road of life. 

Individual tithing, even when successfully prac¬ 
ticed, would perpetuate one of the worst evils of 



ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 93 


the subscription system—the church Boss. The 
larger his tithe the greater his power. He must 
have his way or the tithe will (or may) be di¬ 
verted. The poor preacher is kept hanging “ by 
the eyelashes/’ while the finance committee coun¬ 
sels caution, and the anxious treasurer rarely 
smiles. Everybody knows what he does, and all 
are kept afraid lest the Great One, because of 
some frustrated whim, will do less. Again and 
again, under the subscription system, we have 
seen him reverse the action of the official board 
with a frown, because of the church’s dependence 
upon his “ voluntary ” gift. 

Among the positive thrills of storehouse tithing 
has been the joyous—to us—submergence of this 
brother. You might as well search for a flock 
of dodo’s in your back yard as expect to find him 
in a storehouse church. (An instance is recalled 
where a subscription of $75 had long permitted 
a wealthy “ leading member ” to have “ his way.” 
A distracting “ way ” it had long proved, but had 
to be endured. Noticing his absence from several 
official meetings, an inquiry brought this answer 
from the pastor: “ O, his power is gone. What 
do his threats amount to since we have a dozen 
mill hands, some of them scarcely more than 
boys and girls, paying a larger tithe than his 
former ‘ big ’ contribution.” 

It is impossible to find a more democratic insti¬ 
tution than a storehouse association. One might 




94 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


suppose that it would divide into “ little ” and 
“big” tithers, and that there would be endless 
gossip about how much the various members were 
paying in. The very opposite is true. The tithe 
being paid by numbers and not names, and the 
treasurer always being a discreet individual, little 
is ever known or asked about individual tithes, 
and no over-lordship is known to have been at¬ 
tempted by those who must have paid the larger 
sums. We know a young man who paid a tithe 
of over $800 per year for more than three years 
before it occurred to the pastor to put him on the 
official board. (Under the old system he would 
have expected little less than a vote of appreci¬ 
ation every thirty days, a complimentary banquet 
every quarter, and the right to say whether the 
pastor should go or stay at the end of every year.) 

Maybe it is due to the fact that the storehouse 
tither does not “ give ” anything, but simply pays 
the Lord’s tithe 1 —something that he does not own 
and cannot “ give.” Anyway, we know Chris¬ 
tians who are paying annual tithes of $200, $300, 
$500, $800, and on up to $4,000, and doing it 
unostentatiously, with no air of super-generosity, 
or expectation of being accorded the right of final 
decision on every question. Think of such sums 
being paid regularly, without asking, announcing, 
or public accounting! Is it not the dawning of a 
new day of opportunity and responsibility for the 
church? 



ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 95 


Storehouse tithing always means that the giv¬ 
ing of the non-tithers will be increased. Many 
who will not join an association, under the in¬ 
fluence of the achievements of an association, will 
double, triple, and even quadruple their gifts. 
How can they avoid it? Fellow Christians are 
paying from four to nine times as much as they 
gave, and are happy about it. They are doing 
this not by compulsion, or under the influence of 
emotional appeals, or in response to a grave 
emergency, but regularly, willingly, and volun¬ 
tarily. How can the non-tithers keep up the old 
statement that they are giving to the limit of their 
ability? And how triflingly small do the old 
standards look in the presence of what the tithers 
are paying? In this genial atmosphere the giving 
thermometer immediately speeds up, and in two 
or three years it reaches heights never believed 
possible. “ Let me tell you about that man,” said 
the pastor, “ he used to give $13 a year. He 
failed to join the association, but is now giving 
$104 a year.” He also told of another man who 
had advanced his giving from $52 to $200, and 
only a little while before put in a check for $50 
extra, with the remark to “ use it where it was 
most needed.” You cannot lift a man’s giving 
very high when your only appeal is to the stand¬ 
ard of his own prosperity, for there are not many 
people in the world who think they are really pros¬ 
perous—or as much so, at least, as they think they 



96 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


ought to be! (We have known men to go from 
comparative poverty to affluence without appreci¬ 
able increase in their giving; while some have 
gone from affluence to great wealth without in¬ 
creasing their giving one farthing, and, in several 
deplorable instances, have actually decreased.) 
But when you have a compact group of storehouse 
tithers paying right on through the years, in sun¬ 
shine and rain, sickness and health, prosperity 
and adversity, when times are good and when 
times are bad, according to one definite standard 
its effect upon the church and community will 
soon be noticeable, and the standard of the non- 
tithers will be lifted higher and higher. 

Storehouse tithing ties its members to the 
church in a new and peculiar way. The church 
that lives by the whole round of hurdy-gurdy 
methods, and is always poor, can scarcely retain 
the respect, to say nothing about the affection of 
its constituency. We have often been distressed 
by the flippant way people have spoken of their 
church, and the lightness of their attachment to it. 
Classed as a beggar, they feel toward it as they 
do toward all beggars. 

But when the practice of storehouse tithing 
gives the church enough and to spare, the situ¬ 
ation changes instantly. When the church can 
substitute discounted bills for its perpetual “ be- 
hindhandedness,” those who were ashamed be¬ 
come proud of their church. The church then 



ADVANTAGES OF THE PLAN 97 


takes its place among the efficient employing and 
serving institutions of the community, paying its 
employees living wages, and indefinitely enlarging 
its activities, while its streams of silver and gold, 
coming from the infinite resources of God's plan, 
never dry up! 

How can the church mean very much to the 
man who spends from twenty-five to seventy-five 
cents per day for cigars, and twenty-five cents a 
week for the church? Or to a family which 
spends from five to ten dollars a week for various 
kinds of theatrical entertainments, and one dollar 
a week for the church? Does it not look as 
though the theatre, in their estimation, is from 
five to nine times as valuable as the church? 
Reverse those expenditures, and the situation 
would be normal! When religion’s share is $2, 
$5, $10, $25, $50, $100 per week (as it rapidly 
becomes under storehouse tithing) the church 
begins to occupy a different place in the thoughts, 
affections, and activities of individuals and 
families. 



VIII 

Storehouse Tithing in Practice 

T HE classic examples of Wesley Chapel, 
Cincinnati, Ohio, and Geneva, New York, 
have already been quoted. Twenty-seven 
years ago storehouse tithing not only saved Wes¬ 
ley Chapel from closing its doors, but has kept it 
a vigorous moral and spiritual influence in the 
needy part of a great city. A few years ago 
there were thirteen Methodist churches in the 
“ downtown ” section of Cincinnati, some small, 
medium, and a few of them large. From 1911 to 
1914 Wesley Chapel gave double as much to mis¬ 
sions as these other twelve churches combined. 
At the end of twenty-seven years of storehouse 
tithing Wesley Chapel had all bills paid, and a 
surplus in the bank of $1,450.14. 

Storehouse tithing not only kept the Geneva 
church from crashing on the rocks six years ago, 
but is the chief source of its strength to-day. A 
letter just received from its present pastor states 
that the income of the association for 1921 was 
the largest.in its history, $8,705.05. So much at 
the beginning for the stability of storehouse 
tithing. 

April 1, 1917, was another historic date in the 


98 


TITHING IN PRACTICE 


99 


development of the storehouse movement, for on 
that day the Waverly, N. Y., association of 140 
members began to function. What has happened 
since is too long a story to tell here. Suffice it to 
say that it now has a storehouse association of 
400 members (including 150 children), a benevo¬ 
lence budget of $6,000.00 per annum, a minister¬ 
ial budget of $5,000.00, and is carrying on a pro¬ 
gram of educational and recreational activities 
such as is unsurpassed by any American church 
of equal size. The storehouse association has in¬ 
creased the income of the church from $5,000.00 
to $15,000.00 per annum. The association to 
date, March 1st, 1922, has had a total income of 
$50,000.00, with a monthly income approximat¬ 
ing $1,000.00. 

But the Waverly church, aside from being a 
startling and consistent example of the possibili¬ 
ties that lie in the storehouse plan, has rendered 
invaluable service to the movement in that it has 
generously loaned its pastor, the Rev. George S. 
Connell, and certain laymen, notably the Hon. 
Frank E. Howard, to the church at large. During 
the past three years these men have addressed 
hundreds of churches, group meetings of min¬ 
isters and laymen; summer schools, assemblies, 
and annual conferences. This intelligent seed¬ 
sowing has had much to do with the present wide¬ 
spread interest in the subject. 

It is interesting to note that the second store- 



100 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


house association in the Wyoming Annual Con¬ 
ference was organized at Sayre, Pa., only a few 
miles distant from Waverly, N. Y., beginning to 
function Dec. 1st, 1917. Here a new edifice had 
just been dedicated, and the financial obligations 
were heavy, but for four years Sayre has met 
every local demand in full, and has made generous 
responses to denominational allotments. This as¬ 
sociation now has 170 members, with a monthly 
income from $600.00 to $800.00. Its total re¬ 
ceipts to date have been $30,000.00. Waverly and 
Sayre have not raised one dollar by fairs, suppers 
or entertainments during this period, but have 
continued to use the duplex envelopes for those 
who were not tithers. 

We will abandon the attempt at historic se¬ 
quence, for at this point the storehouse movement 
in the Wyoming conference, having gained the 
proportions of a fair sized snow ball, swept into 
the valley of churches with evef increasing size 
and speed. The marvels it has wrought in the 
past three years cannot be told to the outside 
world without provoking smiles of incredulity. 
From now on we shall only mention names and 
places in isolated cases, but the author holds him¬ 
self responsible for every sentence written, and 
will gladly furnish that which is omitted to any 
who may inquire. 

An association of 75 members was organized in 
a church with 450 members. The entire budget 



TITHING IN PRACTICE 


101 


of this church, including all items of ministerial 
support, property maintenance, and the complete 
circle of benevolences, the women’s missionary 
societies alone excepted, had been $3,100, and 
never had been raised in full. The first Sab¬ 
bath the receipts were in excess of $100. The 
tithers were gratified, but did not expect that 
record to continue. They said: “ A number of 
us have been saving our tithe, and it cannot be so 
large in the future.” But the next Sabbath, and 
the next, and the next, right on through some 
thirty-eight months that record has been kept up. 
Its total income for this period has been $15,000. 
In the meantime its one large industrial plant, 
upon which the prosperity of the community 
largely depended, had one of the most bitter and 
prolonged strikes in the history of the nation. 
Some of the tithers were involved and were 
forced to leave town. The whole community was 
soon in the throes of financial distress. The other 
churches were disastrously affected. The income 
of the tithers’ association was perceptibly reduced 
for a short period, but soon recovered. Do you 
catch the significance of the statement that 
whereas the entire budget including benevolences, 
was only $3,100 per year, the storehouse associ¬ 
ation of 75 members began to bring in $100 per 
week, or $5,200 per year. That is, 75 storehouse 
tithers, for more than three years, have been pay¬ 
ing a tithe of $2,100 in excess of what 450 people 




102 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


gave through the duplex envelope system. And 
then, too, that budget of $3,100 had never been 
raised in full! Remember, this was not an extra 
spurt, or a contest by rival teams, or a heroic 
facing of a grave emergency—lasting for a few 
months, and now forgotten. Not at all, for 38 
months the money has come as naturally as sun¬ 
shine after rain and as regularly as the rolling in 
of the tides. When the Centenary campaign came 
along, this church was apportioned the sum of 
$3,100 annually for a period of five years—just 
the amount of the whole previous budget. Al¬ 
though the tithers’ association had been function¬ 
ing only a few months, it did not hesitate to sub¬ 
scribe $1,500 per year, while the non-tithers sub¬ 
scribed the remainder. At the end of two years 
the tithers had not only paid their subscription in 
full but the second year volunteered to make it 
$1,600, while the non-tithers defaulted $900 the 
second year!! 

One of the historic churches of this conference 
is located in the downtown section of a city of 
some eighty thousand inhabitants. For many 
years it had been fighting a losing battle, and it 
only seemed to be a question of time when it 
would succumb to the inevitable. It had never 
been able to raise a budget of $5,000. Three 
years ago a storehouse association of 75 members 
was organized, the average income of which has 
been more than $ 6,000 per year. That is, 75 



TITHING IN PRACTICE 


103 


storehouse tithers have paid more every year than 
iooo members were ever able to give. Very near 
the bottom in the per capita giving toward the 
benevolences, it at once marched to the head of 
the district. Please recall that these 75 storehouse 
tithers were not hand-picked from the wealthy 
families of the church. The association was com¬ 
posed of volunteers who, in a public service, 
agreed to test the system for one year. They 
were men, women, boys, girls, and children. 
They were wives without separate incomes, high 
school and college students, widows with fixed in¬ 
comes, merchants, mechanics, laborers, school 
teachers, and clerks. But this is a sample as to 
how the system works: One young woman had 
just graduated from college. She was without 
income, but joined. Soon she had a small in¬ 
come, and paid her tithe. In a year she had a 
situation away from home, and was sending back 
a tithe of $120 per year. Under ordinary circum¬ 
stances she would have been giving nothing much 
anywhere, certainly not at home, since she was 
there only a few months of the year. If she had 
subscribed, one dollar per month would have been 
considered generous! Take another sample: A 
modest young man had just moved to the city. 
He joined the association, and is now paying a 
tithe of $800 per year! If he had walked in the 
footsteps of several rich men in that church who 
are giving according to the prosperity standard, 



104 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


his annual contribution would amount to about 

$i-3W- 

Let us see how the system works in the country. 
Some years ago Garrattsville, in Chenango Co., 
N. Y., had become so depleted in population that 
the doors of the Methodist parsonage had to be 
closed, while the church became a part of the 
Edmeston charge, with preaching every other 
Sabbath. An occasional gasp was the only sign 
of life, while its pulse beat, feeble and intermit¬ 
tent, indicated that rigor mortis would soon super¬ 
vene. But a brave pastor decided that the pro¬ 
cession in the wrong direction had gone far 
enough. He moved over with the district evan¬ 
gelist, and opened the long closed doors of the 
parsonage. A revival of religion resulted. The 
people became clamorous for a pastor of their 
own. They were told that if they would organize 
a tidlers’ association of at least fifteen members, 
and give a two months’ demonstration that they 
were really paying their tithe they should have a 
preacher. They did so. This is the report of the 
twelve members who paid their tithe regularly 
through the year: 


Tithe number one.$103.60 

" “ two . 45.00 

“ “ three . 60.00 

“ “ six .. 5972 

“ seven . 28.08 

“ “ eight . 34.40 

“ “ ten . 10.50 












TITHING IN PRACTICE 


105 


“ eleven . 46.00 

“ twelve . 12.00 

“ thirteen . 13.00 

“ fourteen . 20.00 

“ fifteen . 215.00 


$647.30 

This association had just nine wage earners, in 
a rural community without a single industry, and 
with the nearest railway station seven miles away. 
It had been paying $275 for one-fourth of a 
preacher, and about one-tenth of his time. This 
year it is paying $800 for a resident pastor, while 
the district sustentation fund brings it up to 
$1000. Every obligation of the church has been 
met month by month. A Sunday school of twelve 
or fifteen has grown to one of ninety members, 
while a community house to care for the overflow 
and to provide for enlarged service, will be built 
next year. 

Another church, recently organized, and still 
struggling to pay for its new building, organized 
an association of 37 members. Its pastor was 
receiving a salary of $500 per year. The receipts 
were from $185 to $250 per month. The minis¬ 
terial and benevolent budgets were immediately 
doubled. 

Laurens, Otsego Co., N. Y., had always been 
on a two-point circuit. It was growing feebler 
through the years, with extinction looming nearer 
and nearer. An effort to hasten its demise pro¬ 
voked a reaction, and it insisted on having its own 









106 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


pastor. It had never paid more than $350 per 
year for pastoral support, but agreed to raise 
$600, which was soon increased to $800. In the 
middle of the first year a storehouse tithers’ as¬ 
sociation of 25 members was formed, and in a 
few months the pastor's salary was raised to 
$1,300 for the next year. And that was in a non¬ 
growing rural community without a single in¬ 
dustry. An increase of $950 in one year! If 
those 25 people had simply agreed to tithe their 
incomes, spending it when and where and how 
they pleased, not knowing how much their 
combined tithe would amount to, or how much 
of it would be paid into the church, or how 
long it would be kept up if once started, do you 
think that they would have undertaken such an 
obligation ? 

The official report of a church of 1000 mem¬ 
bers for the year 1919 showed a total income of 
$6,432.95, a per capita of $6.43 plus. A tithers’ 
association of 100 members began to function 
May 1st, 1919. Its receipts for the first year 
were $7,308.85. That is, 100 storehouse tithers 
—again not hand-picked from among the finan¬ 
cially able of the membership, paid $975.90 more 
than the entire membership of 1000 had given the 
previous year! It is also worthy of note that the 
following year this association, without any in¬ 
crease in membership, had an income of $12,- 
132.89. Or, the 100 storehouse tithers, in the 



TITHING IN PRACTICE 


107 


second year of the existence of the organization, 
paid nearly twice as much as the 1000 had given 
two years before! You can see what the full 
tithe of this church would mean to the kingdom. 
If the tithe of 100 would be over $12,000.00, the 
tithe of the 1000 would be $120,000.00. In this 
church, also, the paying of the tithers has greatly 
stimulated the giving of the givers. In three 
years the income of this church has increased over 
$19,000.00. That is, the total income last year 
was in excess of $25,000, a per capita of $25, 
an increase in the per capita in three years of 
$18.57! 

Another church was greatly discouraged. Its 
membership was small, its property deteriorated, 
and there were not wanting those who thought 
the time had come to close up its affairs. There 
was an afternoon appointment, and that was in a 
worse plight. A storehouse association was or¬ 
ganized. In two years the salary was increased 
from $800 to $1,800, while the benevolence 
budget was paid in full. Do you think this 
would have been possible if these 25 people had 
simply signed a tithe covenant, paying their tithe 
anywhere or nowhere—just as they pleased? 

Statistics show that the average annual income 
in the United States is $500. That is, dividing 
the total income earned by the total population 
gives a per capita income of $500. But remember 
that everybody is included: Men, women, boys, 



108 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


girls, children, babies, wage earners and non¬ 
wage earners. This makes a per capita tithe of 
$4.16% cents per month. The Storehouse Advo¬ 
cate has collected and published detailed, accurate, 
and comparative statistics of the incomes of 150 
storehouse associations, and the contributions of 
non-tithers in 150 churches for the past two and 
a half years. The calculations that follow are 
based upon these statistics. 

Let us first see how a few of the associations 
meet this exacting standard of $50 per year per 
member. These storehouse associations do not 
have a carefully selected membership. They, like 
the population, are composed of men, women, and 
children, (only babies omitted) ; with husband 
and wife counting two in the association but 
generally only one in the income, and children 
with only fragmentary incomes. 

Kingston, Pa., with 79 storehouse tithers, paid 
a total in twelve months of $8,022.18, or a per 
capita of $101.54. This association is composed 
of 49 females and 30 males, fourteen of whom 
are minors, including some small children. 

The Norwich, N. Y., association of 49 mem¬ 
bers paid a tithe of $3,919.25, or a per capita 
of $79.98. 

The Carbondale, Pa., association of 91 mem¬ 
bers paid a tithe of $5,908.27, a per capita of 
$64.92. 



TITHING IN PRACTICE 


109 


The Oneonta, N. Y., association of 100 mem¬ 
bers paid a tithe of $12,132.89, or a per capita 
of $121.32. 

The First Church, Wilkes-Barre, Pa., associ¬ 
ation of 129 members paid a tithe of $11,825, a 
per capita of $91 plus. 

The Centenary Church, Binghamton, N. Y., as¬ 
sociation of 71 members paid a tithe of $6,148.53, 
or a per capita of $86.59. 

The Congregational church, Oxford, N. Y., as¬ 
sociation of 15 members paid a tithe of $1,664.68, 
a per capita of $110.94. 

The Lutheran church, Oneonta, N. Y., associ¬ 
ation of 14 members paid a tithe of $1,024, a 
per capita of $73.50. 

The First Baptist Church, Johnson City, N. Y., 
association of 115 members paid a tithe of $7,184, 
a per capita of $62.40. 

The Storehouse Advocate carries statistical re¬ 
ports from 133 associations on the Binghamton, 
Oneonta, and Wilkes-Barre Districts of the Wy¬ 
oming Annual Conference of the Methodist Epis¬ 
copal Church. Let us examine these reports for 
the first sixteen months in which the paper was 
issued, being careful to remember that the per 
capita tithe for the United States is $50, and the 
monthly tithe $4.16%. (We will drop the 
fraction.) The result for 133 associations for 
the long period of 16 months is as follows: 



110 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


Excess 


Year 

Months 

Per Capita 

Per Capita 

1920 

Jan.-Feb. 

$5.15 

$ .99 

ii 

Mch.-Apr. 

5.42 

1.26 

€€ 

May-June 

4.65 

.49 

“ 

July-Aug. 

4.25 

.09 

“ 

Sept.-Oct. 

4.66 

.50 

it 

Nov.-Dee. 

4.44 

.28 

1921 

Jan.-Feb. 

4.61 

.41 

“ 

Mch.-Apr. 

5.07 

.91 


Does not this demonstrate, beyond all ques¬ 
tion, that storehouse tithers really tithe? It 
would be impossible to subject these reports to a 
severer test than we have just applied. In such a 
large number of associations, and all in one an¬ 
nual conference, every type of church and com¬ 
munity is represented. Some of them, very 
naturally, would be functioning poorly, and some 
even very poorly. No matter, the good ones and 
the poor ones, the little ones and the big ones— 
all are counted in. None have been weeded out 
because their reports were not up to the standard. 
They were all taken just as they were, and the 
enumeration made just as they had been pub¬ 
lished to the world. (The author will furnish a 
complete file of The Storehouse Advocate to any¬ 
one, anywhere, who will pay the cartage, and 
agree to return the same; he can then make his 
own investigations at his leisure.) 

As this copy is being revised for the last time 
the latest edition of The Storehouse Advocate has 
just come to hand. It contains the statistics for 
the months of November-December, 1921. The 




TITHING IN PRACTICE 


111 


recent editions have been carrying an “ Inter- 
Denominational Statistical Report.” The last 
number has reports from 26 associations, 11 Bap¬ 
tist, 1 Lutheran, 1 Congregational, 1 Presby¬ 
terian, and 12 Methodist. The Methodist as¬ 
sociations are, of course, outside the bounds of 
the Wyoming Conference. These twenty-six, 
Baptist, Lutheran, Congregational, Presbyterian, 
and Methodist associations, with a member¬ 
ship of 1,655, reported total receipts for the 
months of November-December, 1921, of $13,- 
352.11, a per capita of $8 plus for the two 
months, or of $4 plus for each month. The 
non-tithers in these same churches, for these 
same months, paid a total of $10,865.76, a per 
capita of $2.43 for the two months, or of $1.22 
per month against the storehouse tithers’ per 
capita of $4 plus! 

This quotation from the November 1st, 1921, 
bulletin of the First Baptist Church, Oneida, New 
York, is worthy of close attention: 

“ The offerings of this church last year for the 
New World Movement were $2,209.00, and for 
all missionary and benevolent purposes $2,557.00. 
This year it gave to the New World Movement 
$5,958.42, and for all missionary and benevolent 
purposes $6,184.87. 

“ Last year the offerings for current expenses 
amounted to $4,741.00, this year the offerings 
for current expenses were $6,614.05. 




112 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


“ Grand total for all offerings last year, 

$7,298.00. 

“ Grand total for all offerings this year, 

$ 12 , 798 . 92 . 

“ Last year business was good, and the people 
had steady employment at good wages. 

“ This year, since January 1 st, business has 
been dull, with some factories shut down alto¬ 
gether, and others on half time or less. 

“ We believe this remarkable increase in church 
offerings, under such adverse conditions, is due 
entirely to the fact that for nine months of this 
year there has been a storehouse tithers } associ¬ 
ation in this church, which began with 75 mem¬ 
bers, and has now grown to a membership of 
115 .” 

One industrial community in the bounds of the 
Wyoming Conference is in the throes of a dis¬ 
astrous financial depression. Its chief industry, 
employing 1300 men and women, and at large 
wages, has been closed down for more than nine 
months. Noticing that the storehouse receipts 
had only fallen off mildly, the author wrote to 
the pastor and received the following answer: 


“ It is only too trud that we are having a hard time industrially. 
Our relief work this winter will equal all we have had to do for 
five years past. We are running just about even in the matter of 
current expenses—though we raised $500 in the fall to offset 
shrinkage in our income. The storehouse association made it pos¬ 
sible to raise this sum by giving the first half. Then -, him¬ 

self a member of the association, had to spend days and days in a 
personal canvass to get the rest of the five hundred. Our Centenary 





TITHING IN PRACTICE 


113 


is 98 per cent paid to date—quite largely due to the association. 
Our association, for two years, had an income of $7,000 plus per 
year. This year it will reach the $5,000 mark—a very, very re¬ 
markable showing in the face of existing conditions. The associa¬ 
tion has accumulated over $4,250.00 in the new church fund. 
Ordinarily this amount would have gone to the current expense 
and Centenary funds. In which case we should have had a large 
balance in the treasury, and an overplus for the Centenary.” 


Without a storehouse association this church 
would be “ on the flat of its back,” with salaries 
unpaid, and benevolences rapidly approaching the 
zero mark. And do not forget that when special 
help was needed the storehouse association im¬ 
mediately gave $250, while one of the storehouse 
tithers had to spend “ days and days ” begging a 
like sum from the non-tithers. The storehouse 
association did not have to beg one cent, but im¬ 
mediately drew its check for half of the sum 
needed! 




IX 

Objections Answered 

( rriHE Storehouse plan reintroduces Old 
Testament legalism. A friend recently 
made this objection. He was quietly 
asked: “What do you mean by Old Testament 
legalism ?” His answer was quite muddy, but 
holding him insistently to a definition of “ Old 
Testament legalism ” it ultimately became ap¬ 
parent that he had a general notion that the Old 
Testament Christian was told what to believe and 
what to do, while the New Testament Christian 
had the privilege of believing what he pleased and 
doing what he wished! Is that your idea? If 
that is true, it must be jollier to live under the 
low standard (every one fixing it to suit indi¬ 
vidual taste) of the New Testament than under 
the exacting (fixed by God) standard of the Old 
Testament. Then it follows that the swift moral 
progress of the past two thousand years was made 
possible by the repeal of the stiff “ legalism ” of 
the Old Testament, and the wide dissemination of 
the New Testament plan, which allows every man 
to fix the standard to suit his fancy! Not a very 
agreeable conclusion, but inevitable from such in¬ 
accurate premises. 


114 


OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 115 


Friend, God knows us too well to let us decide 
how good we want to be. Knowing us inside and 
outside, He never stops short of telling us how 
good we must be! O, no, we do not have to be 
that good. In fact, we can be just as bad as we 
want to be, or as our opportunities permit. But 
high before the gaze of passing generations God 
has lifted His moral standard. We may break it 
at will, but never without being broken! Is that 
statement true or false ? True, you say. But is it 
anything less than the rankest “ legalism ” ? 

Is it true that, while the Old Testament de¬ 
mands much, the New Testament commands 
nothing—excepting only such belief and obedience 
as we are pleased to render? It is true that the 
New Testament has no specified codes like the 
few that are found in the Old Testament. But it 
has its own definite, iron-clad, legalistic require¬ 
ments, such as: 

“ He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be 
saved, but he that believeth not, shall be damned. 
Mark xvi, 16. Stiffen legalism is not found in 
the Old Testament, but we have never heard it 
declared invalid on that score. 

“ That whosoever believeth in Him should not 
perish, but have everlasting life. ,, John iii, 15. 
Does not this confer certain “ legal ” rights on 
believers ? 

“ Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth 
my word, and believeth on Him that sent me, 



116 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


hath everlasting life.” John v, 24. But what be¬ 
comes of those who do not hear, or hearing, do 
not believe? Are they not deprived of certain 
“ legal ” rights enjoyed by those who both hear 
and believe? 

Do these passages indicate—and their number 
might be indefinitely extended—that the New 
Dispensation leaves us to believe what we please? 

“ For I fear lest, when I come, I shall not find 
you such as I would, and that I shall be found 
unto you such as ye would not: lest there be de¬ 
bates, envyings, wraths, strifes, backbitings, 
whisperings, swellings, tumults: And lest, when I 
come again, my God will humble me among you, 
and that I shall bewail many who have sinned 
already, and have not repented of uncleanness, 
fornication, and lasciviousness, which they have 
committed.” II Cor. xii, 20-21. 

Does this passage—and dozens of others that 
might be quoted—indicate that Christians, under 
the New Dispensation, have the right to believe 
what they wish and do as they please? 

There is not one whit less of “ legalism ”; that 
is, exact , definite, unrepealed and unmodified 
moral requirements and intellectual beliefs de¬ 
manded in the New Testament than in the Old 
Testament. 

The New Testament is redolent with loving in¬ 
vitations, (and so is the First Testament) but 
what happens to those who do not accept these 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 117 


invitations? Is their damnation the less certain, 
the less real, and the less enduringf In fact are 
they not much more terriblef Is it not the New 
Testament which emphasizes, by the lips of Jesus 
Christ, the eternal endurance of God’s wrath 
against sin, and the eternal punishment of 
sinners? 

Nay, does not the New Testament lift the 
moral standard infinitely higher when it makes 
the desire to commit sin equal to its ac¬ 
complishment? 

If that is not carrying “ legalism,” so called, 
to the nth degree, we do not know the meaning 
of language, written or spoken! 

If we are going to reject the law of the tithe 
because it is a “ legal ” requirement—and that is 
the meaning of so-called “ legalism ” objection— 
how can we consistently apply this rejection only 
to the law of the tithe, and not to the whole 
gamut of God’s “legal” requirements? Is not 
faith in Jesus Christ “legalism”? We have to 
believe in Him; we have to confess Him before 
men; we have to walk in His footsteps; we have 
to live the kind of life that He definitely directed. 
These things are not optional, they are obligatory. 
That is, if we do not wish to incur His displeas¬ 
ure, which interpreted means eternal death. 

Is the objection of “ legalism ” valid only when 
we are squirming out of obedience to the one law 
that God made for financing His kingdom? 



118 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The ten commandments are the personification 
of “ legalism.” Are they, therefore, out of date? 

Strange, is it not, Christians are the keenest 
contenders for the sanctity of law in civilized 
society. They rail against the so-called “ lawless¬ 
ness ” of their age. They trace the woes of the 
world to growing irreverence for law. But when 
it comes to the question of God’s law for the sup¬ 
port of God’s cause, they are a champion lot of 
side-steppers! Then the cry of “ wolf,” “ wolf ” 
is heard throughout the land, while an excited 
imagination pictures God’s holy and just law as a 
ravening beast with blood-shot eyes and gnashing 
jaws, ready to devour the helpless. For shame! 

We do not dare to raise the false cry of “ legal¬ 
ism” against the ten commandments, nor yet 
against the positive, terrifically significant and 
even ominous statements of Jesus Christ, such as: 
“ Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which 
leadeth unto life; and few there be that find it.” 
Does it not become apparent that, as we come to 
the close of the period of God’s visible revelation, 
the standard is raised higher and higher, which 
means that the higher spiritual laws of the new 
dispensation have acquired greater and not lesser 
authority! 

“ The storehouse plan looks mechanical, there 
is too much clanking machinery about it.” Is 
that the reason you have never ridden either in 
or behind a locomotive? Is that why you prefer 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 119 


your own pedal extremities to the “ clanking ” 
machinery of an automobile? If you had your 
way would you scrap all machinery, and return 
the race to the hand-labor slavery from which it 
has just escaped? We pity our fathers of even 
yesterday who were not served by the highly de¬ 
veloped machinery of to-day. Who thinks of 
objecting because machinery is mechanical and 
“ clanks ” some ? 

Nor are we at all adverse to the introduction of 
machinery (organization) into the church. The 
Sunday school is a thoroughly organized institu¬ 
tion, constantly growing more so—and more ef¬ 
ficient; the young people of the church have a 
medley of organizations—and all are needed; the 
adults of both sexes are organized for a variety 
of purposes—and who ever thinks of objecting? 
All of this is quite mechanical, and quite neces¬ 
sary. The efficiency of a modern church is meas¬ 
ured by the skill displayed in organizing it from 
top to bottom, and the perfect co-ordination of its 
various organized departments. Such a church 
means that scores of people instead of sitting 
with folded hands or drifting idly about, have 
been set to definite, supervised tasks. 

And who thinks of objecting until we come to 
the difficult and delicate question of financing the 
church ? Just where and when Christianity needs 
perfectly planned and skillfully geared machinery 
it breaks down entirely. We have sad memories 



120 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


of urging good men through weary months to 
complete the annual canvass; yes, and even bitter 
memories of having to lend a personal hand 
finally. And those weary searches for new ways 
of inveigling a few dollars; whether a little more 
could not be wheedled out of the Ladies’ Aid So¬ 
ciety ; whether the community would “ stand for ” 
another bake sale, clam chowder party, oyster 
supper, pound party, poverty social, or minstrel 
show before the year ended, and whether Brother 
Holditfast would not loosen up a bit when the 
pinch came if he were put on the official board in 
the meantime. Bah, memory revolts at all the 
sorry mess! 

Machinery? Was not all of that machinery, 
and about the poorest kind in the world ? Every 
joint creaked, every other bolt seemed to be al¬ 
ways missing, and the way the thing kicked, 
groaned, and bumped indicated that the third,* 
fourth, and fifth cogs in every wheel had long 
since been ground to powder, while its constant 
habit of irregular back-firing left an aftermath of 
broken arms, legs, and heads (feelings, sensibili¬ 
ties, and splintered tempers) ! 

The machinery of a storehouse association is 
simple, but effective. Its money comes like the 
rain and the sunshine—without effort. No sub¬ 
scriptions are taken; no delinquent notices are 
sent; no auxiliary sources of income are sought, 
and no hectic appeals are made to members to 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 121 


“ pay up.” This is the only money raising or¬ 
ganization in the church that dares dispense with 
these devices. The annual meeting fixes the per¬ 
centages for the various objects, which is rarely 
changed during the year. It is really hard to 
find enough business to make the monthly meeting 
attractive. You might suppose that people who 
were paying in their whole tithe would be found 
crowding the front seats at the business meeting, 
so that they could have a lot to say as to how it 
should be spent. But such is not the case in 
actual experience. 

“ It is not the amount of money involved in 
the tithe that I object to,” says another, “ but the 
fact that I am not allowed to administer it.” We 
confess that we have grown a little tired of that 
objection. In twenty-four cases out of twenty- 
five it has been made by people who are not 
and have not been tithing. Most of them have 
admitted that they had not tithed their incomes, 
and the evidence that the remainder had been 
tithing rested upon their personal assertion. 

If people are willing to tithe, but not on the 
storehouse plan, why in the world do they not do 
it? There is not only no impediment but no 
objector. Why have they not begun long ago, or 
why not begin to-day? To refuse to tithe at all 
because they will not tithe on the storehouse plan, 
is the flimsiest kind of an excuse. And yet, so 
many people would leave you under the impres- 



122 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


sion that this is their only difficulty. Is it not 
their handiest and most reliable excuse ? 

At an important religious gathering a preacher 
descanted eloquently on the “ th-r-r-r-rill of the 
personal administration of the tithe,” and was 
quite anxious he should not be robbed of this 
“ th-r-r-r-r-ill.” We want to say several things 
about the personal administration of the tithe. 

There is no possible way by which you can 
check up the personal administrator on the prim¬ 
ary question as to whether he is really paying his 
tithe. What he is paying into the church is not, 
he generally insists, a fair test. That is an end to 
the whole matter. Inquiry cannot be carried 
further, and additional information is not gener¬ 
ally vouchsafed. But you always know whether 
storehouse tithers are true to their covenant. 
Defalcation is possible , BUT CONCEALMENT 
IS IMPOSSIBLE. The per capita thermometer 
reveals whether the full tithe is being paid. 
While some small associations in the Wyoming 
Conference functioned poorly and soon died 
(having never been more than a name), against 
not a single association of 35 or more members 
has there ever been lodged the suspicion that the 
tithe was not being paid. 

There is also no way by which you can check 
up the personal administrator as to the use he is 
making of the Lord’s tithe. Recall the Western 
preacher with 350 personal administrators in his 




OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 123 


church, and who wailed: “ Honestly, I do not 
know where it all goes to.” Let this fact console 
him: ignorance on that point is universal! No¬ 
body knows what he does not know. Permit us 
to say what has been said a number of times: we 
do not assert that personal administration is im¬ 
possible, or that personal administrators are dis¬ 
honest. You will not only do the author a grave 
injustice if you entertain those ideas, but you will 
entirely miss the point of his argument. Personal 
administration of the tithe is possible, and is being 
successfully practiced by many believers in this 
generation. Experience has developed a serious 
objection to personal administration: why should 
personal administrators be so shy about telling 
what they do with the Lord’s tithe? The author 
has never, in a single case, been able to get the 
thousandth part of an inch in that direction 
without having the personal administrator close 
up the subject with a great big bang! Why, 
because he considers the expenditure of the 
Lord’s tithe a “ personal matter.” But we 
insist that that is just where he is mistaken. 
If the tithe were his that would be so. But 
“ the tithe is the Lord’s.” All of it, and all 
of it should go into the support and extension 
of the Lord’s visible kingdom on earth. All 
the world may know where every penny paid 
into the treasury of a storehouse association 
goes. Concealment is unnecessary and is 



124 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


never attempted. Its accounts are open to the 
world. 

There is not a shred of authority, in Scripture 
or in history, for the personal administration of 
the Lord’s tithe. From the time of its establish¬ 
ment down to this day the Lord has designated a 
place where His tithe, the whole of it, was to be 
paid. The only administration of the Lord’s 
tithe that the Jew knew anything about was the 
privilege of paying it. He claimed no privilege 
of distribution, as he had no right of retention. 
Down to the time of Henry VIII the Lord’s tithe 
was quite generally paid to the church. Prior to 
that time no trace of the personal administration 
of the tithe can be found. This practice origi¬ 
nated in the sporadic revival of interest in tithing 
by isolated individuals and groups during recent 
centuries. Tithing being neither the custom or 
law of the church, those who wished to tithe 
their incomes had no recourse but to personally 
administer the same. But since it is the least 
efficient way to tithe it should only be practiced 
when absolutely necessary. An association 
should be formed if only two or three incomes are 
to be tithed. Their combined tithe, paid regu¬ 
larly and used systematically, will accomplish 
more than unchecked and undiscussed personal 
administration. 

An individual administrator must (or should) 
be a good accountant, an art in which many of us 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 125 


are woefully deficient. His tithing account would 
require frequent attention. Every item of income 
and expenditure would have to be carefully kept. 
That would be easy to some, possible to many, 
but impossible to the great majority. This task 
is greatly simplified for the storehouse tither. 
His tithing account can be squared to the last 
penny every Lord’s day. He has every incentive 
for paying promptly. He knows that his fellow- 
tithers are paying regularly, and he is always in¬ 
terested in the latest receipts of his association, 
and wishes to keep the total as high as possible. 

The thrill of personal administration sounds 
well when the r’s are properly rolled, but it is 
more theoretical than actual. Our storehouse 
associations contain numbers of former personal 
administrators, and a fair proportion of these 
have said that they were glad to be rid of the 
burden and uncertainty of personal administra¬ 
tion. They have admitted two difficulties : Per¬ 
sonal administration was too casual, occasional, 
and optional, while the anxiety as to where the 
tithe should go was sometimes a real burden. 

Suppose that 100 people in your church, and 
fairly representative of the average ability of the 
congregation, form an association. Experience 
shows that their tithe will fluctuate between seven 
and twelve thousand dollars per year, depending 
of course, upon the personnel of the association. 
The association has now become the steward of 



126 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


the Lord's tenth. Instead of having one hundred 
separate, unconsulted judgments as to how this 
money shall be used, with the always present 
danger of individual ignorance and selfishness 
asserting itself, you have the collective judgment 
of the entire association. It is still true that in 
counsel there is safety. Is it not true that this 
co-operative tithe, where every expenditure is de¬ 
termined in open meeting after opportunity for 
full discussion, will be more efficiently used than 
if spent independently? That question admits 
of no discussion and only one answer. 

This nation exercises great caution in the se¬ 
lection of its Chief Executive. Before and after 
nomination his whole record is subjected to the 
keenest scrutiny. Every ascertainable fact of his 
life, good or bad, wise or foolish, little or big, is 
dragged into the limelight. And that high posi¬ 
tion can be obtained only by one upon whose past 
the fiercest light of hostile investigation can fall 
and find no blemish! But the nation is too wise to 
ever put itself wholly into the hands of even such 
a man. His acts are entirely administrative— 
carrying out the laws that many others have 
made. He may establish administrative prece¬ 
dents, but he cannot make or repeal a single law. 
He has vast power, but it must be confined within 
constitutional limits, or congress will exercise the 
right of impeachment. This nation never puts 
itself in the hands of one man to do with it as he 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 127 


pleases. When God called for the separated por¬ 
tion, the sacred tenth, He never planned to leave 
it indefinitely in the hands of one man, but pro¬ 
vided a definite place where it should be paid. 

The proper disposition of the first tenth of our 
income, the Lord’s portion, should be a matter of 
grave concern. Can a more satisfactory method 
of disposition be found than to bring our united 
tithe into one treasury, and then, at the end of 
every month to meet with our fellow-tithers, and 
after patiently seeking the Divine direction, and 
with full opportunities for the expression of per¬ 
sonal opinions, decide how every cent can be best 
used for the glory of God. That means that not 
a single penny will go to a single destination that 
cannot stand the light of publicity, and run the 
gauntlet of open discussion. It means that there 
will be no> foolishly impulsive, or uninvestigated 
distribution of the Lord’s tithe. Here is all the 
“ liberty ” that the individual tither could desire, 
combined with the largest possible efficiency in the 
use of the tithe. 

The tonic effect produced by uniting the Lord’s 
tithe is unbelievable by the inexperienced. Unit¬ 
ing the Lord’s tithe is not only a source of su¬ 
preme satisfaction to the tithers, but it gives their 
united tithe a propulsive power, a striking force, 
a lifting influence, which transforms the whole 
life of the visible church! 

Here is where the real “ th-r-r-r-r-ill ” of ad- 



128 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


ministration is found, and not in lonely, isolated, 
irresponsible, and untabulated solitariness. 

“ A storehouse tithers’ association would be a 
divisive influence in a church,” says another, “ if 
very large its accumulation of funds would lead 
to intolerable overlordship in all the affairs of 
the church.” 

The “ accumulation of funds ” is the last thing 
that a storehouse association attempts. It does 
not believe in wasting, but it does believe in using, 
not accumulating the Lord’s tithe. It aims to get 
the Lord’s money at the exact spot where it can 
be used to the best advantage in the quickest pos¬ 
sible time. We do not know a single association 
that is accumulating a reserve unless it has a defi¬ 
nite object in view. If a percentage is reserved 
for a debt, or as a sinking fund for a new church, 
it is always—as far as our knowledge extends— 
handed over to the board of trustees. While it 
rapidly accumulates funds, a storehouse associ¬ 
ation is neither a holding nor a spending concern. 
The whole of the Lord’s tithe is passed on at 
once to those designated to receive it. The 
amounts set aside for the budget and benevolences 
are paid to the treasurers of these funds each 
week, and the only part remaining in the local 
treasury is the small contingent fund. At the end 
of the year this is also disposed of. Every as¬ 
sociation begins every year with an empty treas¬ 
ury. This not only keeps the whole of the Lord’s 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 129 


tithe at work, but prevents any possibility of 
overlordship through the power of reserve funds. 

The “ divisiveness ” introduced into the church 
by a storehouse bloc is a “ bogy ” invented by 
those who are not storehouse tit hers, and who 
have had no contact with storehouse tithers in an 
actual storehouse church, and who would not 
know a storehouse association if they saw one 
walking down the highway! According to that 
theory conditions throughout the Wyoming Con¬ 
ference, by this time, must resemble a perpetual 
Donnybrook fair! The opposite condition pre¬ 
vails, and is largely due to the sense of security 
and sufficiency introduced by storehouse tithing. 
There are fifty active associations on the Oneonta 
District, and the author visits from two to four 
of these churches every week. If there is any 
side of these churches with which he is not 
acquainted it must be the inner side of the 
inside, and he unhesitatingly asserts that store¬ 
house tithing is a unifying force everywhere 
and a divisive force nowhere! Instead of being 
jealous of the tithers, and hypercritical of their 
achievements, the non-tithers generally refer to 
the association in their church with pride. The 
reader cannot be unaware of the unsatisfactory 
financial status of the ordinary church. Each 
church bemoans its poverty, and is tickled like a 
baby with a new rattler when it can just manage 
to squeeze through the year without a deficit. 



130 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


One financial secretary was a born wit. At the 
first official meeting he had ever attended the new 
pastor was delighted to hear him say: “ All bills 
paid/’ and then reaching for a package of papers 
on a chair by his side he flourished them in the 
air, saying as they were brought down with a re¬ 
sounding whack on the desk of the Treasurer: 
“ Except these/’ Is not that always the experi¬ 
ence : “ All bills paid.except these.” “ Ex¬ 

cept these,” like the poor, we always have with 
us. But when you have come to the end of the 
thirty-sixth month without the presence of Mr. 
Delinquent Exceptthese; while the smiling treas¬ 
urer makes the usual announcement of all bills 
paid and a comfortable margin in the treasury 
you will understand what storehouse tithing 
means. The quiet storehouse tithers know how 
it has all happened, and the non-tithers would be 
less than human if they did not enjoy the spirit 
of optimism which has gradually permeated the 
entire life of the church. 

f “ Well,” says another, “ I am willing to give a 
tenth, but I do not want to have to do it.” Who 
ever suggested compulsion? God is not like the 
state. It tells us what we have to do, and will not 
hesitate to handcuff and imprison our bodies, 
confiscate our property, and take our lives, if we 
do not do as we are told. But God tells us what 
we ought to do. He does not use handcuffs, 
prisons, confiscations, and executions. However 




OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 131 


much God may want us to do His will, and how¬ 
ever many incentives He may hold out to us, He 
always leaves us free to do exactly as we please. 
If your judgment is convinced that the tithe is a 
legal and reasonable obligation, and if your con¬ 
science urges you to pay it promptly and fully, 
well and good; but if not, we will be satisfied to 
leave the matter to be settled between God and 
yourself. We do not believe that God wants you 
to pay His tithe unwillingly. Unless you are 
moved by loving loyalty, it might as well be left 
undone. But while we can live at peace with you 
if you do not pay the Lord’s tithe, and are willing 
to excuse you (so far as we are personally con¬ 
cerned) from its payment, we cannot absolve you 
from responsibility for such failure. 

Do you support your wife and children because 
you want to or because you have to? Now, now, 
just keep your voice down in one of the lower 
registers, please. Because you want to, of course. 
But suppose you did not happen to want to ? Lots 
of men do not, only to find that they have to even 
though they do not want to. It never occurs to a 
normal man that the support of his family is op¬ 
tional. And we never feel that a man deserves 
any credit for doing what the law would compel 
him to do if he neglected or refused to do it. It 
is the plain implication of Scripture that the 
claims of the Creator and Redeemer come first— 
even before the family. God never asks for the 



132 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


mildewed remnants of gathered harvests, but 
always for the first fruits, whether of field, vine, 
or flock. The Christian is bound up to the wel¬ 
fare of the kingdom of Jesus Christ (represented 
by the visible church) by ties more sacred than 
any known under the Old Dispensation. Animals 
were slain for the sins of the Jews, while the 
Son of God died for us! Instead of our obliga¬ 
tion being less, it is infinitely greater and instead 
of our duty being optional Calvary’s blood binds 
it upon our consciences with bands that can never 
be broken. The Christian who understands his 
obligation to the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, 
and the Visible Church will pay the Lord’s tithe 
with joy, not because he has to but because it is 
the natural expression of a natural, loving heart. 
There is no higher virtue than wanting to do 
those things judgment and conscience say we 
ought to do! 

“ I believe,” asserts another, “ that properly in¬ 
structed people will give more, and will give it 
more willingly, than they will pay according to a 
definite standard:” This objector will probably 
admit that the Christian church of to-day has 
been fairly well instructed in the art of giving. 
At what point has this education been neglected ? 
It has seemed to the author that the very church 
bells have been taught to drone out the monot¬ 
onous plea “ g-i-v-e—g-i-v-e—p-l-e-a-s-e—g-i-v-e 
—g-i-v-e—g-i-v-e—O-O-O-O-p-l-e-a-s-e ” in end- 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 133 


less, tiresome, meaningless iteration. The con¬ 
stant manner in which the privilege and duty of 
giving has been held before the church in ser¬ 
mons, hymns, and the printed page should long 
since have turned Christians into hilarious 
givers, and filled to perpetual overflowing every 
treasury. 

It will be admitted, we think, that the church 
has not neglected to instruct its constituency in 
the art of Christian giving. First Corinthians 
xvi, 2, has had the right of way for four centur¬ 
ies. We need not speculate as to what that plan 
may do, for we have seen it in operation all our 
lives, and we know what it did not do before we 
were born. The duplex envelope, with its dual of¬ 
fering for budget and benevolence, has helped the 
church to a better support during recent years. 

But does the giving of the giver, when prop¬ 
erly instructed, exceed the tithe of the tither? 
That is an interesting question. Can it be 
answered? It can. The Storehouse Advocate 
not only reports the number of tithers in each 
church and the sums paid per month, but also 
gives the number of duplex envelope contributors 
and the amount given per month. Let us take the 
issue of November 20th, 1921, (the most recent at 
the time this was written), and compare the pay¬ 
ing of the tithers with the giving of the givers. 

Bear in mind that this comparison is for the 
month of October, 1921: 




No. Per No. Non - Total Per 

Church Tithers Total Paid Capita Tithers Paid Capita 

Methodist Churches— 

Oneonta, N. Y. 100 $1,137.78 $11.37 500 $445.79 $ .89 

Norwich, N. Y. 50 315.20 6.30 268 300.19 1.13 


134 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


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West Side, Elmira, N. Y. 120 516.88 4.31 50 73.75 1.47 

Middleburg, N. Y. 19 108.92 5.57 300 159.77 .55 

Columbia Ave., Phila., Pa. 27 288.53 10.69 600 397.08 .67 















No. Per No. Non- Total Per 

Church Tithers Total Paid Capita Tithers Paid Capita 

Fayetteville, N. Y. 36 $150.40 $4.17 50 $82.60 $1.65 

Wenona, New Jersey. 30 135.81 4.52 66 138.38 2.10 


OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 135 


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Presbyterian Church— 

South, Elmira, N. Y.. 37 168.20 4.57 95 287.56 3.02 


















136 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The report for the South Presbyterian Church, 
Elmira, N. Y., is for the month of December, 
1921, because no Presbyterian church reported 
for the issue of October-November, 1921. 

About every type of church is represented in 
this investigation, and it strikingly exhibits the 
possibilities of the two systems. 

In most of these churches the duplex envelope 
system has been used for years. It is well under¬ 
stood and its possibilities have been exhausted. 
Tithing is of recent origin in all of these churches. 
It is not so well understood, but its superiority 
is apparent. 

The non-tithers usually have some in their 
ranks who can give larger sums in emergencies, 
but the tithers—from all the statistics available— 
will pay vastly more through the years because 
their money will come regularly, and in quanti¬ 
ties sufficient to encourage continuous kingdom 
development. 

Can an intelligent mind scan these comparative 
figures and not recognize the superior system ? 

After subjecting both systems to the test of 
actual operation, is it not apparent that bringing 
the full tithe into the storehouse is undeniably 
the superior? 

“ I do not like the storehouse method because 
it is rigid, inelastic,” complains another. If by 
“ rigid ” you mean a definite standard by which 
you will measure the first payment from your in- 



OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 137 


come toward the support of the church, the store¬ 
house method must plead guilty; and if by “ in¬ 
elastic” you mean the actual, regular, full pay¬ 
ment of the Lord’s tithe, the storehouse method 
is once more the culprit at the bar. It was de¬ 
signed to do those two things, and we judge the 
results justify us in writing quod erat demon¬ 
strandum , do they not? The storehouse plan is 
intended for those who take the law of the tithe 
seriously, and who propose to pay it promptly, 
regularly, and fully. But each association leaves 
the actual payment of the tithe to the consciences 
of its members. It permits no investigations as 
to who are paying, or how much they are paying. 
Every member signs the covenant agreeing to 
bring in his or her full tithe, and receives a pack¬ 
age of envelopes without identification marks. 
Its case rests there. The responsibility is now 
with the individual, and not with the association. 
Experience proves that this confidence is not mis¬ 
placed. Among the thousands of storehouse 
tithers we have not heard of a half dozen who 
were suspected of taking advantage of this situ¬ 
ation. A storehouse association is a poor harbor¬ 
ing place for one who is paying the tithe only in 
theory. 

And then, too, is it not time for the church to 
understand that it will positively share, upon the 
basis of the Lord’s tithe, in the incomes of its 
constituency ? The present hortatory methods of 



138 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


appeal not only always leave it with an inadequate 
response, but with a subscription that is worth 
only from seventy-five to fifty per cent of its 
face value. 

If you want a system of un-rigidity that will 
always let you fix your own standard, and with 
sufficiently accommodating elasticity to allow you 
to pay any percentage of your promise that you 
please, we should judge that the storehouse plan 
of paying the Lord’s tithe would not suit you . 




X 

The Danger of Compromise 

M AN’S fatal facility for compromise has 
been one of his handicaps through the 
ages. As soon as he gives mental assent 
to a truth he can no longer deny, he invents 
methods for softening its impact upon his con¬ 
science, while avoiding its application to his own 
life as long as possible. Recall the futile com¬ 
promises by which men sought to solve the slavery 
and liquor problems. Abolition and prohibition 
were the only possible solutions from the begin¬ 
ning. Everybody sees it now, and yet there was 
a time when nobody saw it; while fame, fortune, 
and even life was sacrificed by some who saw 
those truths in the beginning! Man loves to try 
expedients, while devious by-paths have a fasci¬ 
nation never to be resisted. He will go the right 
way—only when there are no more wrong ways 
to try! Abolition and prohibition are historic 
proofs of this fact. 

Just as soon as the achievements of storehouse 
tithing were bruited abroad men began to invent 
compromises and modifications. They desired to 
achieve the same end, but they wanted an easier, 
a softer way of doing it. This is man’s way 


139 


140 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


with everything, and is to be perpetually ex¬ 
pected, of course. But concerning all plans for 
limiting or modifying the storehouse plan, we 
wish to say: 

1. Whatever you do with the storehouse plan 
of tithing, do not compromise the principle of the 
tithe. If you have never done so, set aside the 
Lord’s tithe from this day until your translation. 
If you are going to be a personal administrator, 
all right, but be one! You know the poverty 
stricken condition of the average church, how all 
prevailing modes of finance leave it wringing its 
hands in despair, while a sinning race hurtles into 
eternity. You know now that the law of the tithe 
has never been repealed; that the prophets you 
revere and the Saviour you love were all tithers; 
that Jesus emphatically commended the principle 
of tithe paying, and that He never introduced 
any other method, nor authorized any one else 
to do so; that the Christian church was supported 
by tithes during the first sixteen centuries of its 
existence; that, without authority from anywhere, 
God’s plan was overthrown by a king who was 
both adulterer and murderer; that for four long 
centuries the Christian church has turned from 
one man made financial experiment to another, 
only to be disappointed in the last one tried—as 
it always has been and ever must be—yes, all of 
this you now know. Friend, if God has opened 
your eyes to see that the principle of the tithe has 



DANGER OF COMPROMISE 141 


never been repealed do not, we beg of you, ever 
compromise there. 

2. Do not say: “ I am willing to tithe my in¬ 
come if every member of the church will do it, or 
if we can at least start with every member of the 
official board.” Right never waits for unanimous 
consent, or even a majority vote. If the voice of 
the people is always the voice of God, then God 
is mostly wrong, and it usually takes three or four 
centuries to get Him on the right track. What 
nonsense! Man does not like God’s ways because 
God never gets right finally. He is always right 
in the beginning. And men are God-like when 
they are big enough, not to do right when every¬ 
body will do it, but to do it if it must be done 
alone. Is this the attitude you maintain toward 
the other commandments? Do you hate your 
enemies because everybody will not love theirs ? 
Do you desecrate the Sabbath Day because every¬ 
body will not keep it holy? Do you dishonor 
your Father and Mother because all children do 
not honor their parents ? Are you a thief because 
everybody will not be honest ? The judgment day 
is going to be an individual affair, when each one 
must give account of himself. How does my 
dereliction excuse yours or yours mine? If the 
Lord’s tithe is demanded of one it is demanded 
of all, and not when all agree to pay it. The 
Lord's tithe is not validated by unanimous con¬ 
sent; it is just as valid when nobody consents! 



142 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The man who will not follow his conscience 
until its decisions are confirmed by majority 
action is setting a dangerous precedent for him¬ 
self. That rule, consistently followed, will ruin 
any character. 

3. If you have decided in favor of the principle 
your next step will be to discover the most effi¬ 
cient way for paying the Lord’s tithe. Asserting 
that you will pay it “ anyway you please ” is a 
wrong spirit in which to approach so serious a 
matter. Remembering that the “ tithe is the 
Lord’s ” and that “ it is holy unto the Lord,” that 
is, it is the truly sacred or holy part of our in¬ 
come, we should arrange to pay it in the most 
practicable and efficient way possible. What we 
particularly want to do with it should have little 
consideration. We should desire only one thing: 
To pay it in the way that will be the most pleasing 
to God. That may mean paying it in the way that 
will be least pleasing to ourselves, but there is no 
reason why we should please ourselves in a matter 
of this kind. It is not our tithe that we are 
handling but God’s, and those considerations of 
self that control so many of our other expendi¬ 
tures should not be allowed to have the least in¬ 
fluence over us. It seems to the writer that the 
considerations controlling should be somewhat as 
follows: 

How can I pay the Lord’s tithe so that 

1. I will truly pay it. 



DANGER OF COMPROMISE 143 


2. So that I can encourage others to pay it. 

3. So that my tithe will be put to the best pos¬ 
sible use. 

4. So that I can keep in sympathetic touch with 
other tithers. 

5. So that I will not be diverted by the indif¬ 
ference or opposition of non-tithers. 

6. So that tithing will become one of the fixed 
principles and settled habits of my life. 

7. So that I can best help to bring the Chris¬ 
tian world back to the standard of the 
Lord’s tithe. 

Can anyone, with the established facts of store¬ 
house tithing before his eyes, ask these questions 
and conscientiously adopt some less efficient sys¬ 
tem for paying the Lord’s tithe? 

Scores of Christians have said: “ That is the 
best way, of course—if people will adopt it.” 
But why not get Christian people, people who 
want to pay the Lord’s tithe, to adopt it? If it is 
the best way, and if there is no authority in 
Scripture, and no justification in history for the 
personal administration of this tithe, why, pray, 
should not all Christians adopt it ? 

4. Make no compromise with the limited store¬ 
house plan. This plan proposes that each mem¬ 
ber of the association shall be allowed to retain 
the twenty or twenty-five per cent usually set 
aside for the contingent fund, and be allowed to 
use it when and where they please. Experience 




144 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


has proven this to be a fatal compromise, and for 
the following reasons: 

(1) There is no warrant in Scripture for the 
division of the Lord’s tithe. The Hebrew never 
thought of taking a part of the Lord’s tithe to 
the designated place, while keeping the rest for 
personal distribution when and where he pleased. 
The vials of prophetic wrath would have been 
poured out upon the head of any attempting such 
malfeasance, whoever they might be. “ Even 
unto His habitation shall ye seek, and thither 
thou shalt come; and thither ye shall bring your 
burnt offering, and your sacrifices, and your 
tithes ” Modern Christians seem to think that the 
Lord’s tithe is simply any tenth of their income, 
whether it is the first tenth, or the sixth tenth, or 
the ninth tenth, the last tenth, or the “ left tenth ” 
(if there happens to be one)—just so long as it is 
some kind of a tenth. They also seem to think 
that this tenth is still theirs to be used whenever 
and wherever they please. 

Both of these conceptions are wrong; they are 
diametrically opposed to the truth as found in the 
Holy Scriptures, and, as long as they persist, it 
will be impossible for the church to really accept 
the principle and adopt the practice of paying the 
Lord } s tithe. 

The Lord’s tithe is not any portion of the in¬ 
come, it is the first tenth. That is, it is the first 
portion to be deducted from the net income. Not 



DANGER OE COMPROMISE 145 


written on the tablets of memory and paid some¬ 
time, if not forgotten; nor even set down in an 
account book, which will be squared some day. It 
is a first charge against the income, whether 
that income is from the land, flocks, herds, mer¬ 
chandise, salary, income from investments, or 
whatnot. 

It is not only the first portion to be deducted 
from the income, but it is the first portion to be 
paid out of the income. 

(2) The “ limited ” storehouse plan is a 
palpable and dangerous compromise with prin¬ 
ciple. The ten commandments are good, but dif¬ 
ficult, therefore, let us organize a “ limited obedi¬ 
ence ” church. Why not? If it is right to keep 
back a part of the money that belongs to God, 
why is it not just as valid to keep back a part of 
the obedience due to God? If one was intended 
“ only for the Jews ” (though both were equally 
commended by Jesus) why was not the other 
intended “ only for the Jews ” also? But if both 
are equally binding, why do we assume the right 
to reduce one in practice twenty, twenty-five, or 
thirty-five per cent? Is not this the very evil 
which Malachi thundered against: “ Bring ye the 
WHOLE TITHE into the storehouse.” He was 
dealing with Jews who had accepted the tithe in 
“ principle,” while shaving the practice. He 
wanted the whole of the Lord’s tithe brought to 
the place where it belonged. He also called the 



146 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


partial withholding of tithes robbery—pretty 
strong language. His resonant denunciations set 
our sensitive nerves a-tingle, and maybe we had 
better say farewell to “ Brother Watkins-a ” in 
this chapter as soon as possible! But it ought to 
be said that Malachi conditioned the Divine bless¬ 
ing upon the abandonment of the “ limited ” 
storehouse plan! 

Yes, we know that the “ limited ” storehouse 
was not intended to officially rob God. It was 
expected that the portion reserved should care for 
benevolent objects not under the specific direction 
of the church. It was thought that tithers would 
pay a portion of their tithe—even the larger por¬ 
tion—more freely than they would pay the whole. 
There was no ostensible lowering of the scriptural 
standard, for it was presumed that the whole tithe 
would be used somewhere. But it was an unwar¬ 
ranted and dangerous compromise . It at once 
made elaborate and exact book-keeping necessary. 
The figuring of the percentage to be paid and re¬ 
tained made this unavoidable. It opened the door 
to wild guessing as to how much had been re¬ 
tained or paid. Does it require an acute psychical 
analyst to decide which side of the ledger would 
win whenever the “ limited ” storehouse tither 
got into dispute with himself concerning percent¬ 
ages? And then there would be the question of 
the expenditure of the reserved portion. Exact 
accounting would again be required. He would 




DANGER OF COMPROMISE 147 


have two accounts to balance instead of one, and 
two percentages to figure instead of one, and 
always a balance to consult before he could make 
a payment anywhere, and always there would be 
surpluses to carry or arrearages to figure. Most 
people would soon get gloriously mixed up. And 
then, if they gave up their attempt at exact book¬ 
keeping, and retained their conscience about the 
tithe, they would be in constant doubt as to 
whether they were robbing Peter to pay Paul, or 
just stealing from both! Compare those com¬ 
plications with the simple, scriptural, and satisfy¬ 
ing method of bringing the whole tithe into the 
storehouse! 

(3) It was evidently the laudable desire of the 
limited storehouse plan to make tithing easier, but 
it does, in reality, make it harder. A child can¬ 
not be taught to grow honest gradually; say 50 
per cent the first ten years, 75 per cent in the next 
five years, then 100 per cent toward the close of 
the next six years. Doing right is never made 
easy by going two-thirds or three-fourths of the 
way, and resting up before we try the rest of the 
journey. The true psychological approach to the 
tithe is not to teach men to go two-thirds or three- 
fourths of the way and stop, but to go all the way 
the first time. The final goal will not be made 
easier by delays enroute. When your machine is 
sailing along in “ high,” with every cylinder 
“ hitting ” rhythmically, and the last inch of the 



148 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


glorious mechanism throbbing with power, why 
shut off the gas and clamp on the brakes just as 
you reach the steepest hill? Is that a good time 
and place to “ rest up ” for the rest of the jour¬ 
ney ?! This nation long discussed the resumption 
of specie payment. Many schemes for approach¬ 
ing this end circumspectly were proposed. Finally 
a great man, with the artlessness of a child, said: 
“ The way to resume specie payment is to re¬ 
sume.” And, gasping with astonishment at its 
own stupidity, the nation resumed. There is only 
one way, friend, to tithe successfully, in spite of 
the bad advice of the protagonists of certain “ de¬ 
natured ” storehouse “ modifications ” : pay the 
Lord’s tithe promptly, pay it fully, and “ fight it 
out along this line ” as long as you live! 

(4) The limited storehouse plan attempts an 
impossibility: building an organization around a 
vacuum. Here is the brief history of one “ lim¬ 
ited ” storehouse association: At the initial meet¬ 
ing when the organization was perfected, and 
officers elected for the year, it was decided that 
each tither should be allowed to retain 35 per 
cent of his tithe for personal administration. 
Sixty-five per cent should be paid into the treas¬ 
ury, and the treasurer was authorized to divide it 
every month as follows: thirty-five per cent for 
the budget, and thirty per cent for the denomi¬ 
national benevolences. By that simple ( and 
fatal) expedient all business had been transacted 



DANGER OF COMPROMISE 149 


a year in advance. A monthly meeting was at¬ 
tempted but found impossible. Why should there 
be one? The association had nothing to discuss. 
There was no money in the treasury to dispense. 
Other organizations in the church were active, 
virile, but this feeble infant never got out of its 
swaddling clothes. How could it? It was never 
allowed to exercise voice, limbs, or stomach. If 
it had had a contingent fund to digest there would 
have been some reason for a monthly meeting, 
and a sufficient incentive to induce the members 
to attend. Without that, the income soon 
dwindled, the interest waned, and the organization 
disappeared but never disbanded. Do not forget 
that the real administrative interest in a store¬ 
house tithers’ association centers in the contingent 
fund. It can be used for any purpose, anywhere, 
and its actual expenditure always causes interest¬ 
ing debates; every meeting brings special appeals 
for help from this fund, or special suggestions as 
to how the unexpended balance shall be employed. 

(5 ) The limited storehouse plan has been tried 
out and has failed. The Central New York is one 
of the pathfinder conferences of the Methodist 
Episcopal church. It led the whole denomination 
in Centenary achievements. Under the impetus 
of what storehouse tithing had done for the 
Geneva church (it should be emphasized that this 
church was saved not by tithing, but by unadult¬ 
erated, Simon pure, unlimited storehouse tithing ) 



150 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


the Central New York Conference got more than 
its quota of the desired Methodist Million Chris¬ 
tian Stewards. When the time for the Centenary 
canvass came it again startled the denomination 
with a total subscription far in excess of its allot¬ 
ment. But it did not look with favor on the 
storehouse plan. The association in the Geneva 
church soon changed from the full to the limited 
storehouse plan, allowing its members to retain 
twenty-five per cent of their tithe for personal 
administration; Homer Avenue, Cortland, N. Y., 
and Canton, Penna., organized on the full store¬ 
house plan, (there may have been others, but we 
have not been able to locate them) while the vast 
majority of the churches in the conference either 
did not organize their tithers at all, or turned to 
the limited storehouse plan. 

Most of the copy for the January, 1922, issue 
of The Storehouse Advocate was written by mem¬ 
bers of the Central New York Conference Store¬ 
house Commission, appointed at the conference 
session of 1921 for the purpose of organizing the 
whole conference on the storehouse plan. 

Please bear in mind that this conference has 
tried out two kinds of tithing, and has found both 
wanting: 

1. Unorganized, or individual administrative 
tithing. At the present writing, no large group 
of orthodox believers in the Christian world has 
so large a percentage of signed Christian stew- 



DANGER OK COMPROMISE 151 


ards as the Central New York Conference. Here, 
if anywhere, self-administrative tithing ought to 
have been successful. No conference or denomi¬ 
nation anywhere has an abler or stabler constitu¬ 
ency; each church had a large group of tithers; 
they understood fully what they had done, and 
why they had done it. If self administration is 
God’s plan for this generation , it certainly ought 
to have succeeded wiithin the bounds of this 
conference. 

2. The limited storehouse plan. If this plan 
could succeed anywhere, that fact ought to have 
been demonstrated in the Geneva church. When 
this association was at the height of its usefulness 
it suddenly switched to the limited plan. The 
“ limited ” idea started with 150 people who were 
seasoned storehouse tithers. They had been pay¬ 
ing their full tithe for several years. Surely, no 
limited storehouse association ever could have 
a more favorable beginning. It builded upon 
the foundation of a successful “ unlimited ” 
association. 

The Storehouse Commission of the Central 
New York Conference, composed of the Revs. E. 
B. Topping, H. H. Downey, B. E. Pierce, and 
G. Y. Benton, held its first meeting at Geneva, N. 
Y., Nov. 10th, 1921. Among the resolutions 
passed were the following: 

“ Whereas, the storehouse plan of tithing is the 
only plan that adequately conserves the results of 



152 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


a stewardship campaign , as is conclusively proven 
by many churches which have had the plan in 
operation for extended periods; 

“ And, whereas, the storehouse plan contains 
the only real remedy for the financial ills of the 
church, and is the surest hope of maintaining the 
Centenary standard when the Centenary period 
is past; 

“ And, whereas, the storehouse movement is 
rapidly spreading in our own and in adjacent 
conferences; 

“ Be it hereby resolved that we do earnestly 
recommend to the stewardship division of the 
Committee on Conservation and Advance this 
plan; and respectfully urge you to do all in 
your power to bring this plan to the attention 
of the church at large, and to incorporate it in 
your program for the advancement of the 
kingdom.” 

The Rev. B. E. Pierce, the present pastor of 
the Geneva church, in an article on the “ Steward¬ 
ship Movement in the Central New York Con¬ 
ference,” tells of the organization of an associ¬ 
ation at Auburn, N. Y., but not on the storehouse 
plan, in July, 1916. He says that they refused 
“ to even speak of the storehouse plan.” How 
did it end ? Soon! But read what he says: 

“ The lack of the storehouse plan caused the 
work to he temporary, and as soon as the great 
cause J the mortgage, was removed , the tithers , 



DANGER OF COMPROMISE 153 


feeling that they had accomplished their purpose, 
fell apart, and the tithe was discontinued!” 

Concerning the campaign for Christian Stew¬ 
ards in this conference, and the Centenary Cam¬ 
paign which immediately followed, Mr. Pierce 
says: “ The ease with which the Centenary quota 
was reached was largely due to stewardship—the 
tithers leading the way with their increased giv¬ 
ing. The Centenary conserved the work of the 
campaign. Had it not been for this I fear the 
campaign would have been nearly fruitless” 
That is, this pastor who was present through it 
all, now feels that the campaign for unorganized 
Christian stewards, in a conference where a phe¬ 
nomenally large number were signed up, would 
have been “ nearly fruitless ” if it had not been 
immediately followed by the greatest denomina¬ 
tional campaign for money in all history! What 
is the situation to-day among these unorganized 
tithers? Let us turn to the testimony of Mr. 
Pierce: 

“ We now can go into many churches where 
one-third of the members are signed tithers, and 
fail to find that they have added one penny of 
increase to the budget.” 

Mr. Pierce then adds a sentence which we 
would like to have emblazoned above every Chris¬ 
tian pulpit in the world: MUCH AGAINST MY 
WILL I HAVE BEEN COMPELLED TO 
FEEL THAT THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE 



154 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


STEWARDSHIP EFFECTIVE IS THE 
STOREHOUSE PLAN! 

The Rev. E. B. Topping, of Syracuse, N. Y., 
in an article on “ After the Centenary, What ?” 
says: “ Unorganized tithing will not meet the 
need. We have been seeking a million tithers. 
But it becomes more and more apparent that if 
we secured them, it would not increase the giving 
to our great organized benevolences in any large 
way. I have had the testimony of many pastors 
hearing out this statement. The tithe personally 
administered has not brought any marked increase 
for direct kingdom work” 

Do not these quotations prove that individual 
administrative, unorganized stewardship is an 
ignis fatuus which it would not be well for the 
church to follow? 

But how about the experience of the Geneva 
church with the limited storehouse plan? In the 
columns of The Storehouse Advocate Mr. Pierce 
says: “ We tried the limited storehouse plan, and 
then, with only one dissenting vote, decided to go 
back to the original plan, and we are working 
under that plan at the present time with greater 
inspiration and larger success than ever before. 
We do not have to use any argument, for facts 
speak louder than words. We feel that not only 
does the storehouse covenant solve all financial 
problems, but it also furnishes the key for the 
personal evangelism that is to make this world 



DANGER OE COMPROMISE 155 


the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ” In a 
private letter Mr. Pierce says that the greatest 
loss incurred in the adoption of the limited store¬ 
house plan was in the morale of the association; 
that it was sinking into a lethargic condition from 
which it was immediately lifted by the re-adoption 
of the full storehouse plan. Proving that you 
cannot build a cohesive, aggressive organization 
around a vacuum—and that is just what the 
always empty treasury of a limited storehouse 
association is. 

Wide publicity has recently been given to two 
fantastic schemes for “ modified ” storehouse 
tithing. Since there is no suggestion that they 
have ever been tried out we will not animadvert 
upon them. We feel sure that they would wither 
much more quickly than did Jonah’s gourd if ex¬ 
posed to the blistering sun of actual experience. 
But they remind us of a story: 

“ Well,” said Smith as Jones came strutting 
down the street, with expanded chest and head 
held high, “ you must feel fine this morning.” 

“ Why should I not,” replied Jones, “ my wife 
just paid me a fine compliment.” 

“ Share it with us,” coaxed Smith, “ if she 
could say anything good about you it ought to 
be given to the world.” 

“ Ah, when I kissed her good by, she patted me 
on the back and said ‘ you are a model husband,’ ” 
boomed the happy Jones. 



156 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


“ That was fine, but suppose you look up the 
meaning of that word * model ’ when you get to 
your office,” cautioned Smith; 

Jones did so, much to his regret, ’tis said, for 
he read: “ Model ”—a small imitation of the 
real thing! 

Really that is what, and that is all, all “ lim¬ 
ited ” and “ modified ” schemes of storehouse 
tithing are: very small and very poor imitations 
of the real thing! The shame is that their “ limi¬ 
tations ” and “ modifications ” should be masquer¬ 
aded under the name of the “ storehouse.” 




XI 

Some Important Questions 

I F the reader has not been in the habit of tith¬ 
ing his income, or if he has been a tither but 
not on the storehouse plan, we can under¬ 
stand how unanswered questions would spring to 
his lips at this point. How can anyone who be¬ 
lieves that the weal of the church is the welfare 
of the world view the achievements of storehouse 
tithing other than wistfully? No mind unclosed 
by crass prejudice can fail to appreciate the 
evidence of modem financial miracles found in 
these pages; nor be blind to the stupendous possi¬ 
bilities locked up in this plan when once officially 
adopted, fostered, and propagated by Protestant 
Christianity! Nowhere on this globe can the re¬ 
sults chronicled in these pages be paralleled. 
( These words are being written under the shadow 
of a church whose total income four years ago 
was $6,432.95, and whose total income last year 
approximated $25,000.00—largely traceable to 
the organization of a storehouse tithers’ associ¬ 
ation.) These things are not written on the 
musty pages of history, but are the achievements 
of yesterday and to-day—a modem edition of 
the “ Acts of the Apostles.” 


157 


158 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The incredulous from anywhere (and there 
are many, and many who ought to know better) 
can visit these churches, interview these pastors, 
talk with these official members, and discover for 
themselves whether the things we have written 
are true. The more thorough the investigation 
the more emphatic will be the verdict: “ The half 
was not told me.” 

No demurrer can be entered on the score of 
exceptional opportunities or incentives. These 
results have been achieved in the routine type of 
churches found in every American state: open 
country, village, town, urban, suburban, down¬ 
town, uptown, residential and industrial com¬ 
munities. Storehouse tithing has shown peculiar 
adaptability to every type of community and 
every kind of church in existence. What has 
happened here can happen anywhere, for this 
movement has not been promoted by exceptional 
men (far, far from it), and has not had a shred 
of assistance from exceptionably favorable 
circumstances. 

Why not? People are the same everywhere; 
the need is the same everywhere ; men and women 
whose hearts bum with love for the Redeemer, 
and who are eager for the success of His cause 
are to be found everywhere; what has been done 
in country, village, town, city, industrial and resi¬ 
dential churches among the Baptists, Lutherans, 
Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Methodists 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 159 


can be done in similar communities and churches 
throughout the world; what five thousand store¬ 
house tithers have done in the Wyoming Confer¬ 
ence five thousand Christians will do in any Con¬ 
ference, Synod, Presbytery, Convention, or Dio¬ 
cese when their leaders, instead of doubling their 
fists and squaring to fight before they know what 
it is all about, substitute wise and enthusiastic 
leadership for surreptitious rock throwing. 

In closing this discussion we wish to ask a few 
questions: 

1. Can the modem church be changed from 
the voluntary to the tithe basis? If the tithe is a 
scriptural requirement, yes; if it is not, no. 
Christian people do, in the last analysis, believe in 
the Bible. While many Christians are always 
keen for schemes that will enable them to avoid 
the serious application of scriptural truths to their 
lives and purses, many are not, and will walk in 
the pathway of life whenever it is pointed out, 
however steep it may seem. No one who has felt 
the heart-throb of the modern church, or who has 
caught its low moan of sorrow for the moral woes 
of a lost race can ever be convinced that it is im¬ 
possible to bring the church into the fullest har¬ 
mony with the Divine Will. History, sacred and 
profane, teaches that the church of to-day is 
nearer what it ought to be than it has ever been. 
This being true, all that the church ought to be 
and do is easily within the range of possibility. 



160 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


The church only goes wrong when it is poorly 
or wrongly led! It has wandered into the wilder¬ 
ness often, but never when it was not leader led. 
It has stayed in the wilderness for centuries, but 
only because it had been shackled by poor, incom¬ 
petent, or head-strong leadership. There is no 
organization in this world so anxious to be right 
and go straight as the Christian church. Let it 
be properly taught and efficiently led, and in one 
generation it will be found practicing the pay¬ 
ment of the Lord’s tithe with greater joy, effi¬ 
ciency, and enthusiasm than was ever known 
among the ancient Israelites. The Christian 
church is never in being, it is always in process 
of becoming—something that it is not and has 
never been! The attempt to hold it where it is, 
or make it what it once was, must eternally fail. 
It is ever going somewhere and becoming some¬ 
thing. Where it will arrive in the next genera¬ 
tion depends upon the pathway in which its pres¬ 
ent leaders will direct its footsteps. The church 
is not a continuous quantity but a changing body. 
The church must be reborn, retaught, revisioned 
every thirty-five years, for every thirty-five years 
the whole church dies. The new church is never 
what it wants to be, but always what the church 
of the previous generation determined (perhaps 
unconsciously) it should be! The church of 
to-day may not, therefore, remake itself, but the 
church of the next generation lies in its hands, 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 161 


like shapeless clay on the potter’s wheel, to be 
moulded into any pattern desired. Most adults 
show small capacity for changing their opinions, 
even when they are wrong; and little inclination 
to change their habits, even when they are un- 
scriptural; and no capacity at all for adjusting 
their giving to their prosperity when they do not 
have a definite standard. But all that cannot be 
done with the vast majority of adults however 
hard we may try, can be easily done with children 
—if we teach them while they are children. 

The Wyoming Annual Conference is keenly 
alive to these truths. While it is accomplishing 
something with the Fathers and Mothers it is 
preparing the way to do greater things through 
their children. It is either enrolling them into 
Junior Storehouse Associations or is taking them 
into the senior organizations. This frequently 
reduces the per capita income, but it cares nothing 
for that, for it is preparing the future church for 
larger achievements than the present church 
found possible. These children are growing up 
in an atmosphere where tithe paying is as natural 
as breathing, and as much a part of their lives as 
tongue, and arm, and foot. What this will mean 
to the church of the next generation exceeds the 
capacity of the finest imagination. 

Adult citizens in America destroyed the licensed 
liquor traffic, but they were the children of yester¬ 
day, suddenly grown to manhood and woman- 



162 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


hood, who had been patiently trained to do that 
very thing. Ah, those far-seeing, patiently- 
planning women of the W. C. T. U.,—will the 
world ever be allowed to forget what those initials 
stand for? It seems like only a few short sum¬ 
mers ago when the author used to sing lustily, 
with the k—ds of that “ remote ” period: 

“ Tremble, King Alcohol, for we will grow up.” 

Now, if the truth must be spoken, King Alco¬ 
hol laughed instead of trembled. The writer 
learned that song in a room rented by the Good 
Templars Lodge, directly above the largest, best 
furnished, and most generally patronized saloon 
in his home city! King Alcohol, secure on his 
throne, grasping the sceptre of undisputed po¬ 
litical power, did not have any better sense than 
to fill the air with alcohol-laden, raucaus laughter 
when he heard those piping trebles. Had his 
brain not been befuddled he would have recog¬ 
nized that refrain as his funeral dirge. Those 
children have grown up, and John Barleycorn, 
hoary with age and crime, has been tried, con¬ 
demned, executed, and in an unmarked grave his 
filthy carcass lies buried forever from human 
sight! 

Let the church of to-day, while not neglecting 
the re-education of its adult membership, fix its 
attention on the thorough indoctrination of its 
youth, and the next generation will be a tithing 
church. 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 163 


2. But can a fair proportion of the member¬ 
ship of the present church be brought to adopt 
the plan of storehouse tithing ? In answering this 
question we are not left to uncertain speculation. 
We can speak, as we do on every page of this 
book, from recent and even current experiences. 
The writer is the superintendent of a district of 
fifty churches. It is almost entirely rural, with 
one city of eleven thousand, another of five 
thousand, and a third of three thousand inhabit¬ 
ants, while the remainder is composed of towns, 
villages, and open country. It is that kind of 
territory recognized the nation over as conserva¬ 
tive; conservative outside, inside, and from head 
to foot. When the modem stewardship revival 
came rolling in with the Methodist Centenary 
these churches knew no more about it, and had 
no more interest in it than did the man in the 
moon. Nor did they care much, to tell the truth, 
about the larger programs of the church. They 
had always jogged along at their own pace, doing 
much as they pleased about quotas and extra 
pleas, and ever expected to do about as they had 
done. But Stewardship in the Wyoming Confer¬ 
ence, with the examples of Waverly and Sayre, 
could only mean one thing—storehouse steward¬ 
ship. But the idea of attempting to introduce 
that kind of stewardship on this kind of a district 
was positively repellant. But the initiative of the 
Binghamton District set the pace for the confer- 



164 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


ence, and it had to be given a trial. The eager¬ 
ness with which the idea was seized by enthusi¬ 
astic groups in the villages and towns was a reve¬ 
lation. Those who had never been expected, 
under any circumstances, to accept any kind of 
tithing, swallowed storehouse tithing without a 
single grimace and with a gulp of satisfaction— 
hook, bait, and sinker! Everybody did not do 
this—would that they had. But enough did it, so 
that now we have just as many storehouse associ¬ 
ations as we have charges. Since forty charges 
on this district have from two to three preaching 
places it will be seen that there is still much 
ground to be possessed. About one-third of the 
supporting membership of these fifty storehouse 
churches is found in the membership of these 
associations. But the significant fact is that 
whenever a church begins to take its task seri¬ 
ously, or wishes to put on an advance program it 
turns as instinctively toward the storehouse plan 
as a duck takes to water. They all realize that 
the solution of their financial difficulties lies there. 
That has been the most significant development to 
date. This fact was soon apparent: 

That in every church, large or small, wherever 
located, there was sure to be found a group of 
people who were willing to accept the principle 
and undertake the practice of the tithe. When 
they saw that this plan would lead the church out 
of its perpetual financial depression, and open the 




SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 165 


way for larger service, they wanted to begin at 
once. Church leaders generally fail to appreciate 
the nature of the devotion lurking in the hearts 
of an inner circle of believers in every local unit 
of the universal church. The stability and growth 
of the kingdom is the supreme concern of their 
lives. Once show them that God has opened a 
way out of the calamitous financial difficulties of 
modem Christianity, and enough of them will 
adopt it at once to lift the church to unbelievable 
heights of influence and power. 

Not many great adventures for Jesus Christ are 
being carried on in any part of the world. Few 
Christians are called to give their lives for the 
truth, and fewer yet to risk fame and fortune for 
the cross. The church is in danger of growing 
corpulent and cautious. An American Indian 
went through life stigmatized by the name: 
Young Man Afraid of His Horse. Has the 
church of the Risen Christ grown afraid of its 
constituency f It could suffer no greater calam¬ 
ity. Has it come to the evil day when it believes 
that strength lies in compromise, and when it 
must ask little and require nothing ? 

We do not believe it. There was never a 
time when Jesus Christ was more ardently 
loved, or when men and women were ready 
to adventure more for the welfare of His 
church. Let the leaders call God’s greater 
Israel forward to God’s perfect plan for financing 



166 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


His church and the response will exceed the 
highest hopes. 

3. Can the modem Christian, with the many 
demands upon his income, afford to pay the 
Lord’s tithe? In a conversation with a friend 
about this matter, he turned suddenly, and with 
deep emotion said: “ The heart of this matter is 
not * does the Lord demand it,’ but 4 can I af¬ 
ford it’?” 

Instantly there rose before the mind of the 
writer the memory of that night when, walking 
home from an evangelistic meeting, he turned 
over in his mind the question of becoming a dis¬ 
ciple of Him who said, “ follow Me.” But just 
what did becoming a Christian involve? Ah, yes, 
the ten commandments. No, he could not keep 
them. They were too high, too uncompromising; 
besides, he was not quite sure that he wanted to 
keep them. There was the world to enjoy. Life’s 
sun was just rising, and there was much to see, 
and hear, and taste. But then, if God was God 
as he believed He was; and if God had pointed 
out the way in which His human children were 
to walk, as he thought He had, why, it was “ up 
to ” man to at least try. Looking up into the 
clear dome of a star-studded winter’s night, he 
said: “ Well, God, I guess I’ll try.” And then, 
with a catch in his voice, added: “ I guess I’ll 
make a poor fist of it. But since You insist. 
I’ll try.” 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 167 


And that is all that life is for any of us: trying 
to do what God wants us to do because we are 
trying to be what God wants us to be. 

It is a serious mistake to approach any of the 
Divine requirements on the assumption of our 
incapacity. It is not natural disability but culti¬ 
vated disinclination that prevents obedience to 
God’s laws. 

It is so easy for man to say: “ God’s require¬ 
ments are too stiff; they move on too high a 
plane; concessions should be made at critical 
points, and there should be provisions for excep¬ 
tional cases.” But God is engaged in the great 
task of levelling up the standard of human con¬ 
duct, not levelling down a perfect law to fit self- 
stunted capacities. By this time man ought to 
know that he can never fix his own moral stand¬ 
ards, for he always gets them too low. And ex¬ 
perience should have taught him long ago that 
God nez'er gets them too high. 

Can the modem Christian afford to pay the 
Lord’s tithe? Most certainly. If he has financial 
obligations that the ancient Jew or the early 
Christian knew nothing about, he also has an 
income such as these forbears knew less about. 

Christians who spend hundreds of millions of 
dollars in needless and dangerous luxuries—upon 
dress, vacations, automobiles, theatres (all kinds), 
needlessly expensive foods, chewing gum, cos¬ 
metics, and in ways too numerous to mention, 



168 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


should not refuse to try to pay the Lord’s tithe 
until they have made an honest effort to do it! 
If superfluities must be cut off, it will prove a 
real blessing. If the payment of the Lord’s tithe 
looks hard, and proves hard, it yet ought to be 
attempted. Life grows rich in experience and 
high in moral achievement not by always doing 
the things that are easy, but by leaving the low¬ 
lands for the heights even though the way is rug¬ 
ged, steep, dangerous. 

The author has canvassed church after church 
for storehouse tithers, meeting people in their 
homes, stores, shops, fields, and on the highway, 
urging them to try the Lord’s plan of supporting 
His church for one year. Refusals and accept¬ 
ances have been about equal. Several have re¬ 
fused because they confessed that their tithe 
would pay the whole budget of the church; others 
because they thought it a good thing to keep the 
church poor, and make it “ hustle ” for a living. 
It is now recalled that only one among the 
hundreds interviewed asserted that he could not 
afford to pay the tithe, and he was a teacher in a 
high school, married but without children, and 
getting a salary of $ 3 , 000.00 per year! 

It was noticed that every rejection was pre¬ 
ceded by an apparent mental calculation as to 
how much more the tithe would mean than the 
individual had been paying. It was not, seem¬ 
ingly, a question of obligation, or of ability, nor 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 169 


yet the tragedy of an always empty treasury 
which the Lord wanted filled, but whether he was 
willing to have that much of his worldly goods 
go to the support of the kingdom of God! 

As long as Christian men and women maintain 
that attitude of easy rejection toward one of the 
plainest requirements of the written word, Chris¬ 
tianity will go limping and whining down the 
centuries. 

But no doubt many refusals to even attempt to 
pay the Lord’s tithe, are based upon the secret 
(and probably sincere) fear that it cannot be done. 

There is not a shred of evidence to suggest or 
substantiate such an attitude. Between four and 
five thousand people in the small territory of the 
Wyoming Conference have been paying the 
Lord’s tithe for one, two, three, four and even five 
years. In Wesley Chapel, Ohio, there are Chris¬ 
tians who have been doing it for a quarter of a 
century; in Geneva and Cortland, N. Y., in Can¬ 
ton, Pa., and now in numerous Baptist churches 
there are from two to three thousand addi¬ 
tional storehouse tithers who have been paying 
the Lord’s tithe from one, two, six months to six 
years. We do not know and have not heard of 
one individual who has stopped paying the Lord's 
tithe because he could not afford it; nor one who 
has been financially straightened by doing it; nor 
yet one who has had to curtail his expenditures 
in any direction to do it. 



170 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


On the other hand, hundreds have testified in 
public and in private, that it has brought incalcu¬ 
lable blessings into their lives, such as moral sta¬ 
bility, spiritual development, and the enlargement 
of their fimncial resources. 

No one can say: “ These people would find it 
hard if they actually paid the tithe/’ for statistics 
prove that they have paid it. All the inner finan¬ 
cial facts in connection with these associations 
have been dragged into the light and published to 
the world. Here it was said in the beginning: If 
we are going to say that we are going to do it, let 
us do it; and if we are going to do it let us know 
whether we are doing it; and if we are doing it, 
let us let the world know that we are doing it. 
We have done it, and the world knows that it has 
been done. These statistics have been critically 
examined by many who did not accept the plan of 
storehouse tithing, but not one hint has come that 
they were not proof of the theses that storehouse 
tithers did tithe. Whether Baptists, Lutherans, 
Congregationalists, Presbyterians, or Methodists, 
the evidence is conclusive that storehouse tithers 
tithe —not because they say they do but because 
the money they pay into the storehouse proves it! 

If seven thousand storehouse tithers tithe with¬ 
out personal or domestic embarrassment, and with 
every evidence that it is a joy and not a burden, 
why cannot seventy thousand, or seven hundred 
thousand, or seven million Christians do the 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 171 


same? They can if they will. The real impedi¬ 
ment is not disability but disinclination. 

4. Is storehouse tithing taught in the Bible? 
This is a fair question, and of supreme import¬ 
ance. It has been asked by many. It will be 
asked by many more anxious to know the mind 
of the Spirit. 

Like most questions it cannot be answered by 
a peremptory “ yes ” or a curt “ no.” For 
instance: 

In what part of the Bible do you find the mod¬ 
ern Sunday school specifically authorized. Come, 
now, not elaborate justifications for the Sunday 
school, or logical deductions that make it per¬ 
missible, but specific references to the establish¬ 
ment and conduct of what we know as the Sunday 
school. You do not find the word in your con¬ 
cordance, but you do not have a large one, if.... 
No, friend, if you had one as big as a barn door 
you would not find it. The Sunday school that 
you know was as unknown to the writers of the 
Bible as wireless telegraphy or the hook worm. 
But that fact does not leave the Sunday school 
without scriptural warrant. 

And those splendid organizations, the Woman’s 
Foreign and Home Missionary Societies, will you 
tell us where their names are mentioned in 
Scripture, or their activities authorized? O, we 
know about the millions of money they have 
raised, the missions they have established, the 



172 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


homes and hospitals in which they have gathered 
the orphaned, the sick, and the dying, but all of 
that is evading the question. Just where does the 
Bible say that these women shall do these things ? 

There is also the Ladies’ Aid Society—that fine 
body of women upon whose overweighted should¬ 
ers so large a burden has been laid, the testament, 
book, chapter, and verse, please? And we think 
this time you ought to be confined to the New 
Testament. The earlier portions of the Old 
Testament are very old, you know, and there is a 
growing feeling that they ought not be quoted 
overmuch. Just stay on the hither side of 
Malachi this time. Now find those numerous 
references to this modern maid of all work. O, 
look again, surely there must have been a Ladies’ 
Aid Society in the First Church, Jerusalem. 
(Just telegraph us, charges reversed, when you 
find these references.) 

Do you not see how this method, apparently 
legitimate, would exclude as unbiblical every 
modus operandi in the church of to-day ? 

If storehouse tithing is to be dismissed because 
the Apostles did not organize an association in 
Jerusalem, Antioch, or Athens, then the multi¬ 
tude of organizations through which the church 
of to-day functions are unscriptural, and should 
he abmdoned. 

To all of this it is sufficient to answer: The 
Bible is a book of principles, not policies. God 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 173 


sets our faces in the right direction, puts enough 
guide posts along the road, and then leaves the 
rest to us. God is always more interested in re¬ 
sults than in modes. THE METHOD THAT 
WILL DO QUICKLY AND EFFICIENTLY 
TPIE THING THAT GOD WANTS DONE IS 
ALWAYS BIBLICAL. And is it not just as 
true that all methods which stop short of ac¬ 
complishing the will of God are unhiblical? 
Measured by this standard the storehouse plan is 
undoubtedly scriptural. 

Again, have you ever thought of applying this 
scriptural test to the variagated modes by which 
the church of to-day is financed ? 

You have patronized many church dinners, sup¬ 
pers, fairs, festivals. The profits, whether large 
or small, went to support your pastor, organist, 
choir, janitor, heat and repair your church build¬ 
ing. Did you ever find any Biblical command, or 
permission, or example for these things? If we 
are now going to exclude all methods of financing 
the kingdom not mentioned by name, or justified 
by Apostolic practice, will not all such have to go? 

Only a decade ago probably half the churches 
in America rented their pews, and many do it 
yet. That plan always favored the rich. Did you 
ever find any scripture to justify it? In spirit 
and practice it ran counter to the genius of Chris¬ 
tianity. It was abandoned because it was inef¬ 
ficient, not because it was unscriptural. 



174 STOREHOUSE TITHING 

The evidence is as clear as sunlight that the 
Apostle Paul had no such thought in mind as 
financing the universal kingdom of Jesus Christ 
when he gave the Corinthians wise directions con¬ 
cerning a benevolent collection. This plan cannot 
accomplish what it was never intended to do. It 
is like trying to make a five ton locomotive built 
to pull a twenty ton load over a five per cent 
grade do the work of a two hundred ton locomo¬ 
tive built to pull a thousand ton load over a thirty 
per cent grade! First Corinthians, sixteen-two 
can easily pull the load to which it was originally 
coupled, but it has never been much more than 
able to start the overwhelming tonnage to which 
it has been illegally hitched, while it stands puffing 
and wheezing helplessly before the slightest sug¬ 
gestion of a grade. Then the clam chowder 
special is hurried to the front, and the oyster 
supper pusher is rushed to the rear, while the 
Ladies’ Aid Society is urged to bring up its 
numerous auxiliary ranges, ovens, and boilers, 
and then, after the load has been bisected once, 
divided twice, the reduced tonnage finally just 
makes the lowest grade! Is that God’s chosen 
method for financing a Divine institution? We 
cannot believe it. 

O yes, the collection plates, those chance col¬ 
lectors of odds and ends, and suggestive of mute 
palms asking alms, are they of apostolic origin 
or authority? Are they specifically commanded 





SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 175 


anywhere in the Bible. Permissible, yes; but 
authoritative, no! 

Not one of these methods can be traced back to 
Prophetic or Apostolic practice. No man has 
authority for pointing to any one of them and 
saying: “ This is God’s chosen way for financing 
His kingdom.” We do not object to them simply 
because they have no special warrant in scripture, 
but because they are not only extra-scriptural but 
extraordinarily deficient. Instead of having the 
merit of success they are weighted down with the 
demerit of perpetual failure. 

Having rejected God’s plan for financing His 
work the church had an insoluble problem on its 
hands, and has it yet , and there can be no change 
Ijpr the better so long as it persists in experiment¬ 
ing with substitutes. 

In what sense is storehouse tithing warranted 
by the Bible? 

You will search the scriptures in vain for the 
storehouse covenant printed in this book, and we 
nowhere intimate that Malachi had a modern 
storehouse tithers’ association in mind when he 
said: “ Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse.” 

Nevertheless, we do not believe that there is 
clearer scriptural warrant for any of the activities 
of the Christian church, than there is for the 
storehouse plan of tithing! 

Or, to phrase it differently: 

No organization in the Christian church is 



176 


STOREHOUSE TITHING 


more efficiently carrying out the direct commands 
and plain implications of scripture from Genesis 
to Revelation than is the storehouse plan of 
tithing! 

The proof? 

1. Just as soon as God had an organized church 
to support He decreed that it should be done, not 
by subscriptions, suppers, festivals and collec¬ 
tions, but by the payment of the tithe: “ And all 
the tithe of the land, whether the seed of the land 
or the fruit of the tree, is the Lord's, it is holy 
unto the Lord.” Leviticus xxvii, 30. 

The storehouse covenant says: “ In loving loy¬ 
alty to our Lord, and as an acknowledgment of 
His ownership, we covenant to pay the tithe of 
our income ” 

What God definitely demands in Leviticus, B. 
C. 1500 (or thereabouts) storehouse tithing defi¬ 
nitely agrees to do in A. D. 1922 . 

2. God not only provided that tithes should be 
paid, hut He designated a place where they were 
to he paid: “ Then there shall be a place which 
the Lord your God shall choose to cause His name 
to dwell there; thither shall ye bring you all that 
I command you; your burnt offerings and your 
sacrifices, your tithes and the heave offerings of 
your hand, and all your choice vows which ye 
vow unto the Lord.” Deuteronomy xii, 11. The 
23d verse of this same chapter reads: “ What 
thing soever I command you, observe to do 



SOME IMPORTANT QUESTIONS 177 


it; thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish 
from it.” 

The storehouse covenant says: “We do cove¬ 
nant with ourselves and with our God that we 
will bring the Lord’s portion, the full tenth into 
the storehouse ” 

What God definitely commands in Deuter¬ 
onomy, storehouse tithing definitely agrees to do 
in this year of grace 1922 . 

3. The prophet Malachi urges the people to 
“ bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, (the 
church) that there may be meat in mine house.” 
Malachi iii, 10. 

God had long claimed the whole tithe belonged 
to Him, and Malachi wanted the whole tithe, the 
undivided tithe, without any portion reserved 
for personal administration, brought into the 
storehouse. 

What God told the people to do through the 
mouth of Malachi, storehouse tithing definitely 
gives its solemn pledge to Almighty God that it 
will do. 

What God wanted “ the whole tithe ” to ac¬ 
complish : “ that there may be meat in mine 
house,” storehouse tithing definitely does. 

If this trinity of truths does not establish the 
scripturalness of storehouse tithing then is sense 
nonsense and language without meaning! 
























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